Is this the week where it all hits the fan?
If you’ve ever watched an investigation play out into a sweeping criminal conspiracy, you know that it has to start at the bottom of the hierarchy and work its way up in order to build leverage against the people higher up the chain, in order to scare them into cooperating, catch them in a prosecutable lie so they’ll have to flip, ring them up for contempt in order to scare other witnesses into cooperating, and so on.
Of course this means building a war chest of evidence and testimony from witnesses who have chosen to cooperate. Often these are lower level individuals who merely witnessed the criminal behavior of the more powerful people around them, and don’t have any criminal liability of their own, so they’re willing to just cooperate and move on with their lives. Because these witnesses are not usually household names, and because their cooperation takes place behind closed doors in order to make sure the higher level witnesses don’t know what’s coming, it can give off the outside appearance that investigators may just be spinning their wheels or moving in non-urgent fashion.
But as these kinds of probes eventually begin directly targeting the higher level co-conspirators and household names, the evidence that investigators have amassed begins to spill over into public view. With the January 6th Committee, we’re now starting to see that happen.
Over the past week we’ve seen the committee reveal that it has metadata linking the Trump White House to the election tampering letter that former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark sent to Georgia officials. We’ve also seen the committee reveal that it has a memo accusing Charles Flynn and others of having lied during their testimony. And now the committee is revealing it has proof that on January 4th, Donald Trump held a private White House meeting with multiple January 6th organizers.
This is the kind of evidence and secrets that the committee has uncovered during its painstaking work with lower level cooperating witnesses over the past few months. Now it’s using that evidence to work its way to the top. For instance it’s making a run at the January 6th organizers who met with Trump on January 4th, putting them in the no-win situation of either flipping on Trump or going to prison for contempt.
The kicker is that these are just the specific pieces of key evidence that the committee decided to make public this past week, either to strategically rattle a certain hostile witness, or because it had to be made public in order to subpoena a certain hostile witness. What we’ve learned about publicly this past week is probably just a small fraction of what the committee has uncovered during its months of investigatory grunt work.
The big question is when the floodgates will truly open, and when the entirety of the January 6th Committee’s war chest of evidence will become public. We know that the committee is planning to begin holding public hearings after the holidays, so it’ll all start coming out no later than that. But at the rate things are going, you have to wonder if this upcoming week is when it’ll all start hitting the fan. In any case, it’s now clear that the committee has far more up its sleeve than the naysayers could ever have imagined.
