The so-called “insurrection” on January 6 was in part a disgraceful riot perpetrated by a few rabble-rousing thugs, perhaps with a little help from the feds. Yet the vast majority of the protesters were simply there to support a president they saw as having had the election stolen from him. Regardless of the nuance or the facts, Democrats immediately seized upon the events of that day to impeach Donald Trump (again) and to smear virtually all of his supporters nationwide.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s hand-picked, “9/11-type” Select Committee has been working for several months toward getting to the bottom of events setting the narrative for that day. That committee has now subpoenaed six Trump campaign officials and allies.

According to the Associated Press, those six are “Bill Stepien, manager of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign; Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the campaign; Angela McCallum, national executive assistant to the campaign; John Eastman, a lawyer who advised the former president; Michael Flynn, a former national security adviser to Trump who talked with Trump ahead of the insurrection; and Bernard Kerik, who the committee says paid for hotel rooms that served as command centers ahead of Jan. 6.”

The AP treats it as a given that it was an “insurrection,” even though that is a wildly inaccurate and politically charged term purposefully chosen by impeachment-happy Democrats. The AP is, after all, a key part of the Leftmedia, not an objective news outlet. We need not and do not condone the actions of the rioters to see that clearly.

“In the days before the January 6th attack, the former president’s closest allies and advisers drove a campaign of misinformation about the election and planned ways to stop the count of Electoral College votes,” said Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman. “The Select Committee needs to know every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress, what connections they had with rallies that escalated into a riot, and who paid for it all.”

It is not news that Trump had his staff and allies pursue every possible remedy for what he believed was a stolen election. Despite some very legitimate gripes, his behavior between the election and the riot was not exactly commendable. It is also not news that the Democrats’ Trump Derangement Syndrome makes whatever he says or does an order of magnitude worse in their framing than it actually was.

This committee is rigged to come to a predetermined conclusion — that Donald Trump nearly brought about the end of “democracy” as we know it. The truth is that John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the Democrats’ coup attempt against Trump is far more consequential than a guy in an animal skin standing at Pelosi’s podium. As for January 6, the Democrats’ hysterical pearl clutching, along with the dishonest media’s narrative building, makes an honest accounting of events practically impossible. Shamefully, that’s the whole point.

Update 11/10: After we went to press, 10 more Trump administration officials were subpoenaed, “including former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and senior adviser Stephen Miller,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “Also subpoenaed were Chris Liddell, a former White House deputy chief of staff; Nicholas Luna, Mr. Trump’s personal assistant who reportedly was in the Oval Office with the president on Jan. 6; John McEntee, former White House personnel director; Ben Williamson, deputy assistant to Mr. Trump and senior adviser to then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows ; Keith Kellogg, who served as then-Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser; Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as special assistant to the president for legislative affairs; Molly Michael, special assistant to the president and Oval Office operations coordinator, and Kenneth Klukowski, former senior counsel to Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark.”