The January 6th Committee hits paydirt
For too many months to count, the January 6th Committee has been painstakingly working its way up through cooperating witnesses, leveraging them against hesitant witnesses, obtaining private records, uncovering secret plots, and getting to the bottom of Donald Trump’s treasonous attack against United States democracy – and the committee has done so almost entirely behind closed doors. Now, today, that finally ends.
On some level we should be glad we didn’t have to sit through the thousands of hours of closed door depositions, most of which surely consisted of searching for a needle in a haystack. Any given eight hour deposition probably ended up producing, on average, eight minutes of useful new information. But all it takes is one bombshell from a witness in order to figure out how to approach the next witness. Besides, much of this had to be done in secret, so one witness wouldn’t know in advance what the other witness was going to say about him, and so on. It’s a standard investigative tactic.
Now comes the payoff. The committee is bringing back the witnesses who were fully cooperative, highly useful, and proven to be trustworthy, and is having them testify in public about the specific details that are the most crucial. The committee will also use video footage from the witnesses who went into their testimony trying to dodge every question but slipped up along the way and accidentally said something incriminating. By all accounts, this will be unlike anything else in the history of congressional hearings.
The key continues to be that several members of the January 6th Committee keep publicly ratcheting up expectations for these hearings. Every savvy politician knows that if you don’t end up with much to work with, you tamp down expectations ahead of time, so you can meet them. Instead, these savvy politicians on the committee are basically saying that no matter how high our expectations, what comes out of these hearings will surpass those expectations. So here we go.
