Heavily Hyped Primetime Jan 6 Committee Hearing Lands with a Thud – Opinion

Thursday night saw the end of the Select Committee’s first public hearing on the Jan 6 Capitol protests. The event was utterly disappointing. The primetime hearing, broadcast live on every major network except for Fox News Channel (which instead ran the hearing on Fox Business), had been promised to “blow the roof off the House.” All current reports indicate that the roof is still there.

Remember in the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings when Kamala Harris glared at Kavanaugh, asked a question, and then threateningly said, “Be sure about your answer, sir”? Whoa! I thought to myself, she’s got something big on him. Was that what she had? Absolute nothing. It felt as if an hour had passed since that instant.

The hearing was a success despite much fanfare.

“We will be revealing new details showing that the mob on Jan. 6 was the result of a coordinated, multistep effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and stop the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden,” the committee had said in a statement. “Trump was at the center of that effort.”

There were no such revealing details of any import that I could see, and their attempt to show that Trump was “at the center” of some coordinated multistep effort was weak at best. Trump is not above criticism, and many don’t like his actions and words after the 2020 election, but no one yet has found definitive evidence that Trump said anything even close to, ”storm the capitol, folks!”

The Committee proved that it was violent, that security was poor, that there was no protection, and that Oath Keepers and Proud Boys were present. All very interesting—and all stuff we already knew from the second Donald Trump impeachment trial.

It began with long, boring speeches from Benny Thompson (the Chairman of the Committee) and Liz Cheney (the Wyoming Representative). They were filled with highfalutin language and promises of amazing information. I kept thinking if that’s true, can you please get to it already because you two are putting me to sleep. Thompson was able to raise the issue. “slavery, the Ku Klux Klan, and lynching”In his speech.

Cheney, in particular, is very private:

Vice Chair Liz Cheney: “Tonight, I say this to our Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone—but your dishonor will remain.” https://t.co/W2f3oCDYwh  #January6thCommitteeHearings pic.twitter.com/7tBNkWfdJi

— ABC News (@ABC) June 10, 2022

It seems that she is more interested in a personal mission than the quest to discover truth.

I’m guessing much of the audience had already turned to a different channel by the time the committee started showing the video, which was about 48 minutes into the hearing.

The video is compelling, and as I said there’s plenty of violence and some people who should go to jail, and many have. Although the committee said some of the footage was “never-before-seen by the public,” there didn’t seem to be any that was particularly different than what we’ve already seen, and certainly none that shone new light on the situation. One thing that stood out was the fact that I thought the volume of shouting protesters had been increased to maximum effect. Riots can be very destructive. It’s true.

Following that, the Committee looked into evidence and concluded that Oath Keepers (and Proud Boys) were evil people who orchestrated chaos that night. Some members of those groups have been already been arrested and tried for “seditious conspiracy” for their roles in the violence, as Thompson strangely points out himself. Why is that relevant? There was no evidence that tied the group to Donald Trump, other than that they generally like him, which doesn’t prove him guilty of anything.

Benny Thompson even threw in the scary-sounding “armed anti-government extremist” description of Oath Keepers members, conveniently leaving out that they were not in fact armed at the Capitol.

In reality, the Committee showed that Proud Boys meanwhile went to Capitol BeforeTrump started his speech. This was apparently to undermine their claim that Trump’s speech inspired them all to attack the Capitol.

AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta

The next two witnesses were a police officer injured on the spot and a videographer filming a document that day. The police officer’s story was especially moving—she was knocked unconscious when pushed over by a mob of people—but did nothing to advance the claims that a Trump conspiracy was behind all this. As you might expect, no mention was made of Ashlibabbitt, an Air Force veteran killed in a shooting incident by a Capitol Police officer.

The committee continued with more evidence—evidence that mostly showed that a riot is a scary place to be. Nowhere was there a smoking gun, a new “blockbuster” piece of evidence, or a stunning new narrative.

The hearing was a disaster for Democrats, and it’s hard to see a huge audience that wants to watch seven more hearings. Those hearings won’t even be primetime, and won’t get the same wall-to-wall network coverage. They’ll probably be little noticed by anyone except Adam Schiff groupies.

Wednesday night, in a preview piece about this hearing, I wrote that the Committee had hyped this broadcast to such a degree that if they didn’t produce something spectacular, they would be left with eggs on their faces. They’re looking for a mop about now.