The final report of the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack, all 845 pages of it, is now in the public realm. It was released late on Thursday, so I won't claim to have read it all thoroughly in one night. But unlike the last highly anticipated event like this, Robert Mueller's ill-fated report, we are already familiar with the outlines of what it contains — and there was no Trump official, à la Bill Barr, spinning it for him in advance. So we are in a better position to judge the evidence for ourselves,
The report follows roughly the same organization as the committee hearings that began last summer, but with much richer detail. Those hearings rarely lasted longer than a couple of hours and were tightly scripted. That was probably the most effective strategy and certainly made for gripping TV. But the story of what happened in the aftermath of the 2020 election, as Donald Trump convinced most of his party and tens of millions of Americans that up was down and black was white, is a byzantine tale you can't truly absorb until you see it revealed in all its bizarre particulars.
