(CNN)The House select committee on the Capitol insurrection has a duty far beyond investigating one of the most traumatic days in US history. Its wider mission is to expose and catalog an assault on democracy that is still going on.
The panel, which holds its first prime-time televised hearing Thursday in a bid to imprint the implications of this national nightmare on the minds of citizens, has often been compared to the Senate Watergate committee of the 1970s.
In a climactic moment of those televised hearings that transfixed the nation, former White House counsel John Dean told of how he had informed disgraced President Richard Nixon that there was "a cancer" growing on the presidency. Fifty years later, as Washington still reels from the mendacity of another aberrant president, Donald Trump, that cancer is attached to, and is still growing on, democracy itself.
The House committee set out to expose the truth about Trump's broad plot to tarnish the 2020 election with false claims of voter fraud. House Republicans are so determined to prevent the American people from learning that truth that they are working to discredit the committee with a public relations assault.
On Thursday and in weeks of subsequent hearings the panel is under fierce pressure to establish the depth of Trump's apparent conspiracy. Its work so far suggests it plans to prove that the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was not simply a rally that got out of hand but was the culmination of weeks of...
PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar instructed officials to prepare a defamation lawsuit against "one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published" on Israel. Israel wi...