I gotta be honest, being a political junkie, I am damn near OD’ing on this 1/6 committee stuff. Committee Chair Benny Thompson and Vice-Chair Liz Cheney couldn’t be handling this any better, and their mutual respect is evident. This is how a professional congressional investigation is run. After that initial public hearing with the DC and Capitol Police, the committee has done its work behind closed doors. And while the media keeps peppering committee members, nothing come out that doesn’t originate with Thompson or Cheney. And in this game of chess, these two are giving Bobby Fisher a run for his money.
These two are surgically using events like Trump partisan no shows to keep dropping select neutron bombs on the GOP’s head, by having the lead counsel read into the record the questions he would have asked if the witness hadn’t noogied. Such as wanting to ask Jeffrey Clark about that pesky meta data showing White House Communications shop input into the bogus letter Clark wanted the DOJ to send out to states like Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia. With no possible response from the GOP.
And now both Thompson and Cheney have vowed that in the new year, there will be a series of live, televised hearings, in which they will use a combination of live witnesses, as well as documents and evidence they have collected that paint a clear tapestry of the events leading up to January 6th, as well as the insurrection itself.
Mark my words, once these hearings start, the United States hasn’t seen a carpet bombing like this sine Berlin in 1944-45. They have already interviewed more than 300 witnesses, some of them insurrectionists willing to cooperate, as well as enough documents, phone records, and text messages to fill the Library of Congress. And they’re getting more every day! Neither Trump, nor Meadows, nor Giuliani, nor McConnell and McCarthy have a clue as to what they have. Man! talk about sphincters puckering!
Here’s a perfect example of what I speak. It’s hard enough for a criminal mastermind to pull off a job when he’s solely devoted to that one job. But Mark Meadows, the real life version of Jimmy Breskin’s character Kid Sally Palumbo in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, found himself trying to placate Traitor Tot, keep the 1/6 committee from finding him in criminal contempt, and keeping his cards close to his chest for a POS book he was about to hawk. And as a result, he turned over to the committee 9000 pages of documents, texts, and emails that he himself said were not privileged, pissing the Orange Julius off, released his NYT Bottom seller book, pissing off Trump even more, and then refused to appear for deposition to talk about the materials he had already said were not privileged, earning a criminal contempt of congress citation. News Flash! Inspector fucking Clouseau could catch this ass gasket.
But here’s the McGuffin. The Meadows documents alone show that he was not some far out, peripheral figure. He was in contact with administration officials about election stealing schemes, Ellipse rally organizers, and GOP House members about stopping the count. And on January 6th, Meadows received text messages from FUX News hosts, GOP House members, and Trump family members, begging him to get Trump to call it off. Fuck the Big Lie, the tests show that they all knew who was responsible for the carnage, and who alone could stop it.
That’s just one example, from one tranche of documents. The committee has plenty more where that came from. And sometime after the new year, the committee will get access to the archives documents, and then all bets are off. The committee is fully staffed and fully funded to do what they set out to do, And Cheney has made it clear in her statements that she has Trump in her sights.
Thompson and Cheney have been nothing if not strategic. I expect that the televised hearings will start sometime between mid February to mid March, in order to sow discord in the GOP primaries, and stretch out into the summer to give the Democrats fodder for the general election. Leading up to a final committee report sometime in mid September for the general election. But when the public hearings start, if you can finagle it, I strongly recommend that you tune in. Because it’s gonna make the WWE look like a Godsmack mosh pit.
The continuing failure of Trump and his minions is they always assume Plan A will work as designed. Then it doesn’t and they suddenly don’t know what to do. They fully expected to be dictators at this point and instead they’re on the bad end of the legal gun.
There’s a saying (Mike Tyson?) that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the nose. With these assholes even if their opponent misses they panic – because they realize they are in an actual fight with someone willing to hit them!
So it always is with bullies, whose sole interest in life is beating victims, not to ever TAKE the beatings.
“No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy” (Generalfeldmarschall Helmuth Graf von Moltke)