In the past few hours, the January 6 Committee announced a surprise hearing, which will be Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. ET. They said it had to do with recently obtained evidence. What could that be? Aides are not saying, nothing has leaked so far, so we are left with speculation.

So let’s speculate. Here’s something from the New York Times:

In recent days, the committee obtained and has been poring over hours of footage shot by a documentary filmmaker who was embedded with President Donald J. Trump, his family and members of his inner circle immediately before, during and after the riot.

Not a bad guess. Here’s another.

Mo Brooks did signify his willingness to talk with the Committee. Could this be Mo Brooks’ time in the sun?

Or, maybe Ali Alexander is going to be a star witness? Sure beats going to the House of Many Doors, right?

Here’s another idea.

Now here’s the one that I like.

CNN:

Eastman contends the agents “forced” him to unlock his phone. A seizure warrant document included in Eastman’s filing noted any electronic devices agents seized were to be sent to Washington, DC, or the Justice Department inspector general’s forensic lab in northern Virginia.
Eastman is asking a federal judge to force the Justice Department to return his property, destroy records it has obtained and block investigators from being allowed to access the phone.
The search and seizure occurred the same day that federal agents raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department lawyer sympathetic to Trump’s conspiracies of election fraud.

Let’s rank these possibilities, shall we?

  1. I think Ginni Thomas is the least likely. I base that upon an instinct that since she’s the biggest fish, they will leave her for last;
  2. Ali Alexander is a small time punk. If he’s got enough incriminating evidence weighing against himself, then I think he would come forward and sing like the proverbial canary;
  3. Mo Brooks is a good possibility. He got knifed by Trump, his career in politics is over, at least for the foreseeable future, so if anybody would have a reason to flip, it would be Mo;
  4. Eastman is quite probably the linchpin in this entire case. He seems to show up everywhere, with Trump, with Ginni Thomas, with Rudy Giuliani. If anybody knows where the bodies are buried, it could be him.

So I would say it’s a toss up between options 3 and 4: but, and this is something to remember, Jeffrey Clark’s electronics were seized the same day that Eastman’s phone was. It is entirely possibility that the hearing will focus on the result of that raid.

If you have any other thoughts or notions about tomorrow’s suddenly called hearing, please share in the comments.

 

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13 COMMENTS

  1. While Eastman is my top guess too, here’s my theory. The witness is one of the aides that came forward in the last week or two. And not only can they provide eyewitness testimony of what they saw, they’ve got documented proof that’s incontrovertible…file, video, something. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a whole group of people on this one.

    Whatever this is, something about this info means it can’t wait until mid-July.

    • Not saying you’re wrong, but what could not wait until mid-July? We’re talking a few weeks. Government moves like a glacier, what makes this different?

      • Because, Ursula, they’re doing this NOW…out of the blue, no prior announcement and it’s labeled as “new evidence”. Whatever this is, the J6 Committee–none of whom are stupid or panicky people–decided that this needed to get out ASAP. In their judgment, whatever they were told totally changed the math.

  2. I think Eastman or Clark might be the ones shedding copious amounts of steaming brown organic matter by this time tomorrow but I think there’s another possibility, especially since security of a witness(s) has been speculated upon.

    You mentioned that documentary guy. Apparently he hadn’t turned over everything he had to the Committee prior to his appearance. He now has done so. We also know he spent a lot of time with Trump. Even if he doesn’t have video of say a particularly damning moment on January 6 itself (I really think we’d have seen it – withholding it would have gotten him into some serious shit with the Committee who wouldn’t go for the “I didn’t lie – I just didn’t tell you everything” argument. No, they’d be recommending Obstruction of Justice charges to DOJ!) it’s more than a little possible he made AUDIO recordings of a lot of his private chats with Trump. And there’s something in there that he either forgot or didn’t make a connection or…something. Which again is hard to believe but if it was weeks before Jan. 6 and he was only hearing one end of a phone call and other evidence filling in the blanks might have since been discovered or the connection itself was. Like Maddow this Committee seems awfully determined to fact check, fact check some more and then fact check again.

    Remember, it was AUDIO that did in Nixon. It might be what undoes Trump. Now combine that with the whole security thing and the fact this documentarian and his people are British and it gets more interesting. Not that Putin hasn’t had people assassinated here in the U.S. But he’s been damned careful to make sure Russia’s tracks were covered. And while he’s had his goons make serious efforts to cover their tracks over in Great Britain he’s been far less concerned with assassinating people there. Vlad knows damn well that if it comes down to it and Trump thinks “singing” on Putin will get him a deal to live out life in some sort of house arrest at Mar A Lago he’ll do it and Putin is the kind who will lash out. Say at the guy who provided the literal smoking gun. So I can see why the Committee would want to get this out there and on the record both before anything bad can happen or a disinformation campaign can be mounted to blunt its impact.

    That’s why I think the documentarian will be back on TV tomorrow. But whomever it turns out to be it’s going to be epic and bad for Trump, his Big Lie and those who have been selling that nasty-ass snake oil.

    • I don’t think TFG has any dirt on Putin. TFG was the supplicant and Putin the alpha dog. He doesn’t have any info on anyone above him, there was no one above him. He apparently did have a call w/Putin right before the election, but that was probably to beg for help. But no amount of disinformation, courtesy of Russia, was going to change the outcome of 2020, not after 4 yrs of chaos.

      I also think the surprise witness is going to be the documentarian. His film is being released soon and, according to Tim Miller (former Log Cabin rethug, current pundit on MSNBC) who said he ran into the film-maker this past weekend, the guy has already hired his own security.

    • Never trust the shiny object or the sexy explanation. While certainly possible, the documentarian sounds like too much hype. My mind remains on the aides.

      • Wise advice and I did admit it was fantastical, perhaps even to the point of bat-shit crazy. But hey, for over a half-century I entertained a ridiculous hope. That one day I’d see World Series baseball being played in Wrigley Field. Hell, I didn’t even allow myself the hope of the Cubs actually winning. Just seeing them in the World Series was all I dared dream of. After 2008, a year in which it sure seemed like the proverbial planets were aligned and they had all the tools in place AND it had been a hundred years since they’d won the World Series (every franchise has a bad century now and then. Don’t they?) and it all fizzled I gave up hope. Even when the miracle happened, not just making it to the Series but actually winning it despite a Manager who’d done such a brilliant job up to that point damn near MIS-managed them into losing (and his actions cut at the team’s heart – it was clear to them he panicked and abandoned trust in some great players) I woke up wondering if it was all some cruel dream. Then Trump won and I felt (and still do) it was karma telling me life’s fucked up and don’t ever think I’m not ready to fuck any and everyone just for fun. But the point is the most improbable of miracles sometimes happen. We dream of impossible shit and 99.0000000(to infinity) percent of the time they don’t come true. But you gotta admit sometimes we need to distract ourselves with a bit of fantastical bullshit dreams.

        • Well…by now, you’ve likely heard it’s Cassidy Hutchinson, Mark Meadows’ aide, who’s our witness. That serves to underscore my point. While I agree the need for fantastical bullshit dreams, I usually restrict those to fiction in various media. My mother used to be terrified of me loving that fiction so much that I’d lose my grip on reality. Ironically, it had the opposite effect as the years rolled on. Such fancies are easy to make out as stories because a) they make too much simplistic (as opposed to simple) sense and b) it doesn’t hurt like reality so often does. Guess the moral of the story is a bit of a paradox: never say “impossible” because nothing is but never confuse “possible” with “plausible” because you SO want it to be true. Failing at that last part is how Karl Rove set up the GOP for failure in 2008 and the subsequent takeover by the loons who made Trump possible.

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