Welcome to the lightning round
It’s been said that it takes a lot of hard work to make things look easy. That adage would seem to apply to the January 6th Committee, whose televised primetime public hearing on Thursday night featured a barrage of witnesses corroborating each other and piling on about Donald Trump’s culpability.
Most of those witnesses are Trump’s own handpicked people – and some of them are even related to him. Yet one after another, they’re all painting an inarguable picture of Trump’s criminal guilt. The live hearing was like watching a lightning round on a game show where contestants took turns spitting out one correct answer after another.
The thing is, most of these witnesses never wanted to testify against Trump. Some of them went to great lengths in court to try to avoid having to testify. Some of them initially gave uncooperative testimony behind closed doors before later relenting and providing better testimony. And some of these folks only testified because they didn’t want to go to prison for contempt of Congress.
The point is that the January 6th Committee had to spend a long, long time gradually chipping away at the real story hidden beneath the surface, obtaining the testimony of a lower level witness in order to use it to pressure a higher level person into also testifying, and various other investigative and interrogative tactics.
It took a long, long time for the committee to find various ways to obtain all the damning testimony that it strung together during the lightning round of Donald Trump’s own people selling him out one after another. Now we’re seeing the payoff.
