Everything just changed
For the first five January 6th public hearings, I already knew most of what was presented – as did many of you – because it was all reported by major newspapers a long time ago. Each hearing had a few new tidbits here and there, but it was really just a matter of taking everything that was publicly known and packaging it in such a way that the average American would hear about it, and the whole would be seen as more than the sum of the parts.
Tuesday’s sixth public hearing, starring Cassidy Hutchinson, was the first hearing where most of what was presented was brand new to me. That’s a big deal. It means the January 6th Committee really has managed to unearth much more damning details and plotlines than the media has been able to unearth.
So this isn’t just going to be about whether the sum total of what’s been uncovered to date will be enough to convince midterm voters to punish Donald Trump’s complicit Republican Party. This is going to be about how much more the committee has been able to uncover.
Former Republican Congressman Denver Riggleman, who worked for a long time as a researcher for the January 6th Committee, publicly hinted after Tuesday’s hearing that Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what the committee has uncovered. This would be nothing short of stunning, given just how stunning the Hutchinson hearing was in its own right.
Everything has now changed. The parameters of these hearings have just changed entirely. It’s never been about just how ugly Trump’s criminal conspiracy was. Whatever one can imagine, it was surely even worse. It’s always been about what could be uncovered, and how ugly that would be. Trump and his people behaved idiotically, but they did work hard to try to cover up as much of this as they could after the fact. Now it appears the committee has managed to puncture much deeper into Trump’s criminal plot than even the most optimistic of observers could have imagined. It now looks like we’re just getting started.
