People throughout the world will never forget the events of Jan. 6, 2021, at the United States Capitol in Washington D.C.

An angry mob stormed into the Capitol building, threatening the lawmakers who were there to certify the Electoral College vote from the 2020 Presidential election.

It was a shock to see television footage of the Capitol under siege. We wondered how it could possibly happen in a society with such a long history of peaceful government operations.

Now 18 months later questions are still being raised. Televised Congressional committee hearings are taking place to try to determine exactly how much former President Trump and his associates knew about plans for an armed assault.

Some lawmakers are calling the process a witch hunt, an attempt to distract the public from current issues such as the economy and energy prices. They would prefer that the riot goes down in the history books as just the action of a small number of radicals who acted on their own initiative.

The hearing process has already shown that such a conclusion might not be accurate. It doesn’t appear to tell the whole story.

One thing we know is that Trump prepared his speech. He didn’t just stand before a large crowd and make spontaneous remarks. He thought about what he wanted to say. He made a decision in advance to tell people to march to the Capitol.

We also know that a substantial amount of time elapsed between the speech and his late afternoon message to the rioters to go home.

He watched television from the West Wing for most of the afternoon without taking any action. He was asked by associates to try to put a stop to the violence but instead he waited.

Those facts alone point to the need to ask questions. The public has a right to know what all the key players did on the days leading up to Jan. 6 and on the day of the riot.

The conclusion could potentially be that Trump isn’t guilty of any wrongdoing, that he wasn’t aware of the intentions of some who participated in his rally.

If that’s the case, it should be established through a system of due process. The committee is right to gather as much factual information as possible from a wide range of people with connections to the White House. There should be full explanation of what transpired.

Only three other historic events seem to compare to the Jan. 6 situation. They are Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the Kennedy assassination on Nov. 22, 1963 and the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

A wide range of books have been written about those three events. Extensive efforts were made to uncover details about what occurred and how it occurred.

The public has a better understanding of those historic moments as a result of that research. People still read John Toland’s description of Pearl Harbor, William Manchester’s book Death of a President and a number of other classic historical accounts.

The Capitol riot captures the interest of the general public in much the same way. People want to know the inside story. They want to understand what happened.

The process of interpreting the riot is very important to our future. We need to study what went wrong, what parts of our chain of command failed to prevent a mob from storming the Capitol.

We have to understand it in order to learn from it. If it gets swept under the rug, it’s very likely that similar circumstances will arise again. It would become probable that we’d repeat the same mistakes.

I’m cheering for the committee. I want it to uncover as much as it can about a major historic event. My journalist’s instincts tell me that we haven’t yet learned all there is to learn about how things unfolded. Some of the story is still waiting to be told.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent