The committee’s use of journalistic tools points to something important. In recent years, many discussions of the falsehoods drowning out American political discourse have framed the battle for attention as a fight between a dwindling number of media organizations committed to the facts, on one side, and shameless liars pursuing their own self-interest, on the other. But as the committee is vividly demonstrating, other institutions can have a commitment to the truth as well—even a political institution such as Congress.

The legislative branch is not usually known as a temple to candor. Yet the committee’s work shows just how much Congress can be capable of when it tries. As Thompson; the committee vice chair, Liz Cheney; and others on the committee have emphasized, as members of Congress they have all sworn an oath to “support and defend the Constitution.” “That oath,” Cheney declared during the committee’s first hearing, “must mean something”—arguing for the significance of the committee’s work and the integrity of the democracy it seeks to protect. The committee is creating a definitive record and insisting on the importance of the values that Trump sought to undermine, truth among them.

Trump himself seems to recognize the effectiveness of the panel’s approach, reportedly complaining about how the absence of pro-Trump Republicans on the committee makes it difficult to complicate the story with his version of events. But the former president and his allies are still doing their best to muddy the waters. In response to Hutchinson’s damning testimony, Trump seized on her memory of being told that the president had lunged for the steering wheel of the SUV carrying him away from the Ellipse, grappling with a Secret Service agent to try to direct the car toward the Capitol. “Her Fake story … is ‘sick’ and fraudulent,” he wrote on his Twitter look-alike, Truth Social. After anonymous sources “close to the Secret Service” suggested to reporters that the altercation hadn’t taken place, the far-right Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene argued that Congress should focus its energy on taking apart the SUV story.