January 6th Committee lands multiple big fish as cooperating witnesses
Stephen Miller is set to testify to the January 6th Committee tomorrow, per the New York Times. This comes after Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone testified today, and Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner testified days ago. These are the kinds of “big fish” cooperating witnesses that the committee has long been hoping to land.
The committee has publicly confirmed that Ivanka and Jared’s testimony was “helpful.” If Cipollone’s testimony were unhelpful, the committee would have publicly said as much by now. If Miller were planning to be unhelpful, the committee wouldn’t be wasting its time.
The committee’s strategy to land key witnesses is clearly working. This strategy dates all the way back to when the committee decided to start things off by subpoenaing Steve Bannon, knowing he wouldn’t cooperate, so it could make an example out of him by getting the DOJ to indict him for contempt.
Bannon was never going to cooperate because he was knee deep in the January 6th plot, and cooperating with Congress would mean incriminating himself. He wasn’t willing to make it easier for the DOJ to nail him on his underlying crimes, so he decided to just let himself get indicted for contempt, which carries a shorter prison sentence than the other potential charges Bannon is up against. This is also true of other witnesses who have refused to cooperate with the committee.
But it’s very a different story for witnesses who don’t have any underlying criminal liability in relation to January 6th. As best anyone knows, the likes of Pat Cipollone, Ivanka and Jared, and Stephen Miller aren’t suspects when it comes to January 6th or obstructing the election results. This means that in order to cooperate with Congress, they don’t have to testify against themselves; they just have to testify about any crimes that they witnessed others committing.
It makes sense that these kinds of witnesses would rather show up and testify against others, than stay home and get themselves criminally indicted for contempt. Even though the Bannon contempt indictment has since been downplayed by the media, it appears to have had a major impact on motivating a number of key witnesses to cooperate. And these are just the cooperating witnesses that we know about. What else does the committee have up its sleeve?
