This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Over the decades, there have been some very high-profile

investigative panels that have looked into

national and political crises. The Keefebawber Committee famously looked into organized crime.

The Warren Commission in the early 60s investigated the Kennedy assassination, and the Senate

held its Watergate hearings, which led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. And yet, arguably,

none of those committees has had to tackle a political emergency as profound as the January 6th attack

on the Capitol. The basic contours of what happened at the Capitol have never really been in doubt,

yet the Select Committee had fundamental questions it needed

to answer. Was Trump's in action during the rioting a failure of leadership or a real strategy,

a way of fomenting chaos to retain power? Were groups like the oathkeepers, just a bunch of

angry white nationalists, or were they in fact the armed vanguard of a coup?

The committee has just released its official report, and the New Yorker is publishing it in book

form, partnering with Celadon books. The report is comprehensive, let's say, long in other words,

and taking in every ugly detail of Trump's attempt

to delegitimize this election is honestly a challenge to the spirit. But as one member of the

committee, Jamie Raskin of Maryland told me, the committee's work here was to establish a definitive

historical record, and the rest is up to the Justice Department and the courts.

One thing is clear from this report we cannot afford to look away. Democracy remains under attack.

And as I wrote it in the introduction to the volume, a citizenry that can no longer bring itself

to pay attention to such an investigation or to absorb its astonishing

findings, risks moving even farther toward a post-truth, post-democratic America.

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