The January 6 Committee has been a political and public-relations bust. This is why, on its way out the door, the Committee is desperately trying to make a splash with criminal referrals it was obvious from the very start its members were going to make in an effort to try to destroy their conservative political opponents.

The Committee was a carefully crafted hit squad with members hand-selected by Speaker Pelosi. 99% of its proceedings were secret depositions akin to a Star Chamber. The rights of the Republican minority to participate were stripped and no minority or witness counsel were allowed to cross-examine the witnesses—mocking due process.

Worse yet, the Committee’s entire focus was on relitigating something one wing of Congress had already litigated and lost—former President Trump’s second impeachment trial. The Committee simply refused to accept the acquittal in the Senate and walk away.

The one aspect of the Committee’s work that might actually have been useful—the research of the “Blue Team” into the law enforcement and intelligence community’s failure to protect the Capitol—was jettisoned from the final report (demoted to a mere appendix) at Vice Chair Cheney’s insistence in favor of strictly political content.

The Committee’s last gasp is anticlimactic. The important point is that this is its last gasp; this Committee is now largely dead and will be fully dead on January 2, 2023.

On January 3, 2023, the new House should begin investigating the massive and unexplained intelligence and security perimeter failures that led to a group of rioters bursting into the Capitol.