Looks like the January 6th Committee has indeed gotten to Tony Ornato
Even as the dumbest of pundits have continued to yell simplistic things like “the January 6th Committee must subpoena Secret Service Tony Ornato right now or else all hope will be lost,” we keep being reminded that nothing works that way in the real world.
For instance, when Ornato announced his resignation from the Secret Service yesterday, it seemed a fairly clear sign that he was trying to find some way to get himself out from under the legal mess he’s in. The January 6th Committee has accused him of giving dishonest testimony, which puts him on the legal hook whether he broke any laws in relation to the Capitol attack or not. If Ornato were to come clean, and then try to make up for it by giving helpful but embarrassing testimony about his own actions on January 6th, it would likely mean the end of his Secret Service career anyway. So resigning felt like a sign that he was looking for a way out the mess.
Sure enough, Ornato is now telling NBC News that he plans to cooperate with the January 6th Committee. We’ll see how far he’s willing to go with that cooperation. But it’s not a surprise that he seems to be trying to keep himself from getting criminally referred to the DOJ for lying to Congress and/or obstruction of Congress.
Some have suggested that Ornato’s resignation is about trying to remove himself from any internal Secret Service or Homeland Security investigations. But that’s not really how things work. For instance we all saw the DOJ Inspector General seize Jeffrey Clark’s cellphone, even though Clark was a former DOJ official at that point.
If Ornato was already on the hook in relation to any criminal investigations into January 6th, he’ll still be on the hook for it now that he’s resigned. But Ornato’s apparent willingness to cooperate with the January 6th Committee suggests that he doesn’t see himself as having any underlying January 6th criminal liability, and at this point he’s simply worried about cleaning up any criminal liability he’s since created with the committee itself.
And so it appears that the January 6th Committee has managed to gain the cooperation of a very crucial and previously uncooperative witness, not by stomping its feet and “aggressively” hurling an essentially unenforceable subpoena at his feet, but instead by using real world political leverage to wear him down so that he figured out that his best move was to cooperate. This is why the January 6th Committee keeps racking up wins – and why it would not be racking up wins if it were listening to the simplistically “aggressive” advice that the dumbest of pundits keep insisting it follow.
