How the January 6th Committee won
The January 6th Committee has scored a clear victory from its interactions with Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Even though his cooperation was temporary, it’s turned out to be comprehensive and crucial. The evidence Meadows turned over incriminates himself, Donald Trump, and others.
So how did we get here, and why didn’t we get here sooner? It turns out those two questions have the same answer. The committee didn’t get Meadows to cooperate by asking nicely, or by stomping its feet, or by making some “aggressive” move that the courts would never have allowed to stand anyway. That’s not how you win with these kinds of probes.
In reality the committee secured this victory before it even approached Mark Meadows. You know those three hundred lower level cooperating witnesses we keep hearing about? The committee spent these past months working with those witnesses to amass incriminating evidence against the bigger fish like Meadows. That way, when the committee went at Meadows, it already had enough evidence against him to scare him into cooperating – and it worked.
In a probe like this, you can’t just make a run at the biggest fish first, unless you’re looking to lose. If you want to win, you work with the little fish to nail the bigger fish, so you can then pressure the bigger fish into giving up the biggest fish. It’s the only way this kind of investigative probe can succeed.
