Multiple House Republicans have already been sold out to the January 6th Committee by their own staffers
If any insurrectionist House Republicans have given cooperative testimony to the January 6th Committee, we’re not aware of it. Nor would we expect them to be eager to cooperate. If they testified, they’d be incriminating themselves, and then they’d have to worry about the DOJ indicting them for seditious conspiracy. So they’d rather take the political hit, or even roll the dice on contempt, than testify against themselves.
This is why the most important witnesses in these kinds of probes tend to be the people who were on the inside, saw everything, and knew everything, but didn’t participate in the criminal plot themselves. Most commonly, these are staffers who would rather sell out their bosses than go to prison for contempt of Congress.
Sure enough, January 6th Committee member Zoe Lofgren has announced that staffers for various unnamed House Republicans have been cooperating with the committee. Specifically, as part of their job duties they were listening in on their bosses’ phone conversations on January 6th, and they’ve been telling the committee all about these phone calls.
This is fascinating on two levels. First, it means the January 6th Committee has managed to expose the insurrectionist actions that various House Republicans secretly took on January 6th, without even needing the cooperation of any of those House Republicans. We’ll be hearing all about it during the upcoming televised public hearings.
Second, by announcing ahead of time that various staffers have been cooperating, the committee has surely sent insurrectionist House Republicans into a paranoid panic. Did one of their staffers sell them out? If so, which one? Suddenly they can’t trust any of their staffers anymore, and don’t want to talk to anyone in their own office. Then they have to think about perhaps testifying to the committee after all, in an attempt at playing down their actions and defending themselves – all without knowing whether any of their own staffers are among the gang of staffers who have sold out their bosses.
The point of an investigation like this is to find witnesses who have more to gain by cooperating than not cooperating, such as these House Republican staffers – and then use that cooperation to scare their bosses into either testifying or doing something stupid to further incriminate themselves. Ahead of the public hearings, the game is clearly afoot.
