Why 'footnotes' and 'small print' are a 'powerful' part of the Jan. 6 report: legal expert

Much has been said and written about the January 6 Select Committee’s final report, which was more than 800 pages long. But according to legal expert Benjamin Wittes, co-founder of the Lawfare website, there is still a lot to be learned from the report if one reads the “footnotes” and “small print.”

In an op-ed published by the Washington Post on January 25, Wittes explains, “When the House Select Committee on January 6 published its 800-plus-page report last month, it released a huge trove of underlying material: hundreds of deposition and interview transcripts and documents galore. The report also cites court filings, newspaper articles, public statements and, yes, a great many tweets. Hundreds of thousands of pages, all told.”

Wittes emphasizes that the report is valuable not only because of the report itself, but also, because of all the other material it leads to.

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“It is rare for a government body to show its work to the extent that the Committee has,” Wittes observes. “Normally, footnotes in an investigative report point to interviews readers can’t access. They refer to grand jury transcripts, internal memorandums of interviews and other materials the reader cannot simply click on and search. The January 6 report’s 4286 endnotes, small print that people so often skip, by contrast, offer a guide to this vast and vital public record.”

Wittes points out that the report’s footnotes, for example, “help explain why the Committee was unable to unravel a key element of the post-election story” and tell journalists “where to find the good stuff in the pile of material just dropped in their laps.”

“For nearly a month,” Wittes writes, “I have studied the footnotes and the document they support. Legal scholars, historians and others will analyze this material for years to come, but already, some takeaways are clear. Notably, the Committee shared not just its interpretation of events and the raw material from which it drew, but also, used the notes to make thousands of connections between the two. It’s a powerful model for future investigative bodies, one that allows anyone to check the Committee’s interpretation of its evidence.”

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Read Benjamin Wittes’ full article at this link.