Rachel Maddow just nailed it
Today we saw Corey Lewandowski publicly testify – if you could call it that – about Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice crimes before the House Judiciary Committee. The first several hours of it were the kind of crapfest whose only purpose was to boost House Democrats’ legal standing in their court battles over impeachment testimony and evidence. But then near the end, we got to the part that really mattered. It was Rachel Maddow who hit on the most salient point.
House Democrats brought in a professional counsel to question Corey Lewandowski for a half hour straight. No five minute blocks. No running out the clock. No alternating between parties. It was just a straight up grilling. Lewandowski quickly got flustered and essentially admitted that he’s lied in interviews, while being forced to pretend he didn’t know what he’d said in his own book. Most importantly, Lewandowski acknowledged that he has no basis for disputing anything that’s in the Mueller report, which documents an instance of Donald Trump asking Lewandowski to commit felony obstruction of justice for him.
The question is how many people were even still watching the hearing by the time the professional counsel took over the questioning. Cable news outlets had already cut away from the hearing, and die-hard viewers had to hunt down C-SPAN in order to keep watching. If the cable news networks had known that the most compelling and worthy part of the hearing was going to be at the end, maybe they’d have stuck with it, or cut back to it.
On her show tonight, Rachel Maddow pointed out that the House Judiciary Committee would have done a lot better to have led off with the professional counsel’s questions first thing, or to have at least told the cable news networks ahead of time when the good part was going to happen. She’s absolutely right. Hopefully Chairman Jerry Nadler was watching. He and the Democrats made these rules about the outside counsel, and they can modify them.
