So THIS is what the January 6th Committee has been doing all this time
So what exactly has the January 6th Committee been doing with its time behind the scenes these past few months? It’s confirmed that it’s interviewed hundreds of witnesses and obtained huge amounts of evidence, but what’s come of it? Now, as these things tend to work, we’re getting our answers.
Yesterday the committee revealed that it’s learned of a January 4th White House meeting between Donald Trump and multiple January 6th planners and organizers. This is the kind of meeting that Trump and his closest people were certainly hoping would never come to light. But through its due diligence of interviewing witness after cooperating witness, the committee unearthed the meeting, learned who all was in attendance, and is going after them. These are people who, if pushed into flipping, can give up Trump directly.
This week we also learned that while Mark Meadows was cooperating with the committee, he was the one who turned over the PowerPoint presentation that incriminates the Trump White House. This means that Meadows’ cooperation, while very brief, was also very fruitful. So how did the committee manage to scare Meadows into even briefly being willing to cough up evidence like this? It surely did so by talking to all those lower level cooperating witnesses, some of whom must have provided evidence against Meadows, which the committee then used to pressure him into handing over evidence like the PowerPoint document.
This is how these probes work. If you want to succeed, you have to start from the bottom up and gather as much evidence against the higher level people as you can, so when you do make a run at them, you can actually take them down. If you just go after the top dogs first, you’ll swing and miss. Working from the bottom up isn’t guaranteed to work, but it gives you a realistic chance. Working from the top down is guaranteed to fail. This is simply how these kinds of probes work. It’s time for media pundits to acknowledge this, instead of grandstanding by absurdly demanding that the committee go straight for the top dogs.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report