More than five months since the January 6 coup attempt, there is an ongoing effort to conceal from the American people the full scope of the conspiracy and the fascistic forces mobilized by Trump and the Republican Party, with the aid of top officials in the FBI, the Pentagon and the US Capitol Police.

There is a division of labor between the two parties of US capitalism. The Republican Party has overwhelmingly lined up behind the would-be-Führer Trump, repeating his false claims that the election was fraudulent and that the storming of the Capitol by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, white supremacists and neo-Nazis was a non-event.

The Biden administration and the bulk of the media work to suppress stunning revelations, some emerging in congressional hearings run by the Democrats, documenting the critical role of Trump allies within the state in sabotaging any defense of the Capitol complex.

Pleading with Trump’s Republican accomplices for “bipartisanship” and “unity,” the Democratic Party, itself a party of Wall Street and the military, is terrified of the political and social consequences of revelations exposing the stench of dictatorship behind the façade of American “democracy.” Each new revelation is systematically downplayed or entirely ignored by the Democratic leadership as well as the mainstream media, from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the broadcast and cable news networks.

On Tuesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, director of the Army staff, and Gen. Charles Flynn, currently the commanding general of the US Army Pacific.

In the course of the hearing, the following revelations emerged:

• The FBI failed to act on over 50 separate notifications by the social media platform Parler, relaying, in the words of Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, “specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol.” In one warning, a Parler user called on fascists to come to D.C. on January 6 to take on “Antifa” and “start eliminating people.”

• Director Wray refused to answer why the Bureau did not issue a threat assessment specific to January 6 or coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security and designate January 6 as a National Special Security Event. Nor could Wray explain why the FBI had yet to turn over documentation requested by the committee.

• Gen. Piatt admitted that he did not want federal troops to be used as a “clearing force at the Capitol,” even as the building was under siege by fascistic militias and desperate lawmakers were begging for help.

• Neither general could explain why it took hours to send National Guard troops to clear the Capitol. Their absurd stonewalling about the need for a “concept of operation” plan was belied in previous testimony by then-D.C. National Guard Commander William Walker. Walker said Piatt and Flynn justified their rejection of his initial request for permission to deploy National Guard troops, at 1:49 p.m., on the grounds that having soldiers deployed to the Capitol would be “bad optics.”

Walker further testified in March that he had 155 guardsmen fully equipped and ready to deploy, and that their timely dispatch to the Capitol could have “secured the perimeter” and “made a difference.”

No one at Tuesday’s hearing mentioned the fact that Charles Flynn is the younger brother of retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Days before the January 6 coup attempt, Michael Flynn publicly urged Trump to declare martial law and hold new elections at gunpoint in swing states that had given Biden his margin of victory.

On the same day, the House Administration Committee held a hearing with Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton, during which Bolton discussed the contents of his fourth “flash report.” In the report and in the course of the hearing the following was revealed:

• The US Capitol Police Containment and Emergency Response Team, or CERT, spent a total of $90,075 in 2018 and 2019 for training by a private paramilitary contractor run by neo-fascist former Special Operations killers who cut their teeth in America’s dirty colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

• The same CERT team failed to respond to urgent requests from besieged police within the Capitol during the coup. During questioning it was revealed that one CERT official told a special-ops officer that CERT did not want to deploy “less-lethal” ammunition because “they did not want people falling down the steps.”

• CERT failed to carry out “leadership evacuations,” i.e., efforts to rescue targeted Democratic lawmakers as well as Vice President Mike Pence from militarily trained militia members who invaded the Capitol and demanded that they be hanged.

Committee Chairwomen Zoe Lofgren asked Bolton if CERT’s failure to deploy put “congressional leadership or even the vice president in danger?” Bolton, with emphasis said, “It is a concern that they were not there.”

Virtually none of these facts have been reported by the mainstream media or mentioned by the Biden administration or the Democratic congressional leadership. Joining the conspiracy of silence, including on the integration of neo-Nazi paramilitary forces into the Republican Party and the state institutions of repression, are the so-called “progressives” within the Democratic Party. Not a word about these revelations has appeared to date on the twitter accounts of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her follow House “Squad” members.

In early March, when Walker first testified about the one hundred and ninety-nine minutes between the initial request on January 6 to top military command for the deployment of the National Guard troops and its final approval, the WSWS wrote, “If the events documented by Walker had occurred in any other country, they would correctly be seen as an attempted military coup. Walker’s testimony, however, has largely been ignored and downplayed in the media.”

Three and a half months later, the information that has come out in the limited and carefully circumscribed congressional hearings confirms this analysis. Such is the decay of American democracy, however, that an attempted fascistic coup by a sitting US president is swept under the rug by the ruling class, in the name of “unity” and in defense of a bipartisan policy of war and social reaction.

These developments must be taken as a sharp warning by workers. In the defense of democratic rights and against the growth of fascist forces, no confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party or any faction of the ruling class. Only the united struggle of the working class, nationally and internationally, conducted on the basis of a conscious struggle for socialism, can halt the capitalist drive to war, mass poverty and dictatorship.