The January 6 committee ‘hearings’ are carefully choreographed performances.
The January 6 committee ‘hearings’ are carefully choreographed performances.
T uesday’s January 6 committee hearing was another snapshot of why the committee is both important and fatally flawed. The panel continues to make a compelling case that former president Donald Trump was and is unfit for the office. But its one-sidedness and lack of basic due process render much of its work suspect.
We’ve already noted that the topic of Tuesday’s session was Trump’s pressure campaign against Republican state-election officials, in which he tried to influence them to reverse now-President Biden’s victory by positing unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud and mass noncompliance with election laws.
Committee Democrat Adam Schiff (D., Calif.) led the questioning. Schiff is a curious — or maybe a not so curious — choice to serve on the committee, all of whose members (seven Democrats and two Republicans) were selected by the uber-partisan House speaker Nancy Pelosi, who always manages to find plum assignments for her fellow California Democrat. Though Pelosi excluded from the committee those Republicans chosen by GOP leadership who were deemed too loyal to Trump — because that would have, you know, called the committee’s objectivity and scrupulousness into question — Schiff was invited to serve despite being the personification of Democratic anti-Trump obsessions (Pelosi having assigned him lead roles in promoting the Trump–Russia collusion farce and impeaching Trump over the Ukraine kerfuffle).
A Harvard-educated former federal prosecutor, Schiff is an extraordinarily able lawyer, particularly effective in the examination of witnesses and weaving of a narrative. Nevertheless, his track record, and the patently politicized double standard it illustrates regarding Pelosi’s composition of the committee, demonstrates why the inquiry into a matter of great significance is being ignored by much of the country.
On Tuesday, there was more testimony about outlandish election-fraud claims by Trump and his campaign, this time centering on the contested states of Arizona and Georgia, which the former president lost by narrow vote margins (10,457 and 11,779, respectively). The spotlight fell mostly on allegations of massive fraud in Fulton County, Ga., including cries about a suitcase stuffed with suspicious ballots. One of Tuesday’s witnesses, Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling, convincingly explained that these claims were easily disproved by extensive evidence, including video evidence, that was available to the Trump campaign.
Yet the campaign continued to fan the fraud flames, with the predictable result that some rabid Trump supporters threatened election officials. Reprehensible? Undoubtedly so . . . but, to repeat my observation in the above-linked post, Schiff’s emotive indignation about protests at the state officials’ homes would seem more genuine and persuasive if congressional Democrats weren’t, at the very moment of these hearings, turning a blind eye to similar protests by pro-abortion leftists at the homes of Supreme Court justices.
January 6 committee proceedings are not adversarial, more resembling scripted programming than evidentiary hearings. The pathos for Tuesday’s performance was provided by Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, an amiable Fulton County election worker who related the shock of finding herself publicly accused by top Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani of conspiring with her mother, Ruby Freeman, to circulate fraudulent Biden ballots. Democratic veterans of the Clinton years, you can certainly understand, take great umbrage at the notion of a president and his cronies using the bully pulpit against private citizens. Anyway, Ms. Moss says the family has been subjected to death threats from Trump supporters. She was video-recorded being handed what she described as “a ginger mint” by Ms. Freeman; but, as Schiff showed, Giuliani publicly insisted that mother and daughter actually exchanged “a USB drive” that was somehow connected to fraudulent votes — an allegation that, like rafts of Trump campaign-fraud allegations, was never backed up with proof.
On that score, Arizona house speaker Rusty Bowers, a solid Reagan Republican and former Trump supporter, recalled being pressured intensely over voting-fraud allegations by the campaign. In response, he pleaded for Giuliani to show him some evidence. Finally, Bowers recalled, Giuliani told him, “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.”
That may be a new detail, but, as with nearly all of the committee’s revelations, it is from a story that has long been known. The flurry of “stop the steal” lawsuits were covered exhaustively here a year and a half ago, while they were happening. The biggest tell regarding their frivolousness, I then explained, was that the campaign’s lawyers folded every time a judge offered them a chance to prove their fraud allegations. Trump publicly maintained that courts were using the standing doctrine as a pretext to reject his claims while ignoring the evidence. It wasn’t true. Yes, a number of courts appropriately applied standing rules where the law dictated that they do so; in other cases, however, the campaign quietly dropped its claims when courts noticed that they weren’t being seriously prosecuted; or the campaign, when invited to prove its fraud allegations, responded by either withdrawing them or declining the opportunity to prove them at trial.
The most high-profile witness of the day was Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state — he of the now infamous January 2, 2021, phone call, during which the then president of the United States browbeat him over the state’s election results. I will address that in a separate post. For now, suffice it to say that because the January 6 committee doesn’t do norms — quaint stuff like cross-examination, putting things in context, airing all sides of a multilayered story — Schiff’s portrayal of the call was distorted: Trump demanded that Raffensperger pull 11,780 votes out of thin air, one more than what would have erased Biden’s lead. In fact, there’s a good deal more to it than that — not exculpatory of the former president, but mitigating in the sense of what exactly he was asking for, the circumstances under which he was asking for it, and how unusual this gambit was.
I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that it was not as singular as the committee suggests, and that Raffensperger was uniquely positioned to explain this . . . if anyone had asked him. But nobody did because these are not evidentiary hearings, but thematically arrayed acts in a show trial. No one is permitted to put questions that part from the party line.
To summarize, a committee of members chosen solely for their intense opposition to Trump has decided (drumroll) that Trump is uniquely loathsome and should be disqualified from future office — and don’t mention that House Democrats, in their rabid partisanship, botched the impeachment that might have accomplished that 17 months ago. And that, at a minimum, Trump should be criminally prosecuted — and let’s not tarry over how the committee’s intentionally skewed presentation is making that look far easier than it would actually be, how it would rip the country apart, and how it would make vengeance prosecutions a permanent feature of a constitutional republic that is going banana republic.
The January 6 committee “hearings” are carefully choreographed performances. A search for truth works from evidence through to conclusion under venerable rules of due process. A performance, however, starts with a conclusion and arranges the pieces as needed to get there, omitting what doesn’t help.