In a June 17 post, I stated, “. . . the January 6 Committee is a farce and Donald Trump is a scoundrel.” I stand by those conclusions.
That said, a scoundrel need not be a criminal, and the attempt to make the scoundrel one by hook or by crook is an embarrassment to the country. Thanks, Liz Cheney, for lending your esteemed family name to political behavior that is reminiscent of banana republics and the worst political thuggery of the twentieth century. Andrew C. McCarthy in his column (see below) on the latest happenings of the January 6th Committee exposes the abomination.
The Committee’s sleight-of-hand maneuvering included the demand that Trump counselor Pat Cipollone testify to add weight to Cassidy Hutchinson’s (aide to Mark Meadows) earlier hearsay testimony that Trump came unglued after his January 6 speech.
The Committee then molded the interview in a manner not to allow him to contradict Hutchinson’s hearsay. Everyone in DC knew that he would, so what did they do? They didn’t give him the opportunity. Thus, committee hanging judge Zoe Lofgren (D, Ca.), on a committee of hanging judges, soiled herself with the claim that Cipollone “did not contradict other witnesses”. Of course, he didn’t. The questioning was structured in such a way as to not allow him to. What a sham.
Power-hungry prosecutors have a number of techniques at hand to twist testimony. One is to never ask the witness simply what the person saw, said, or did – point by point. Contradictions would inevitably arise between the two accounts. That isn’t good when the goal of the show trial is to put on a show of guilt. If witness-A’s testimony does the trick, don’t allow witness-B to mess up the script. And, by the way, declare to the public that B “confirmed” A.
Our modern politics has become a theater of the absurd. In this latest episode, we have a tabloid, combustible, self-indulgent ex-president, a neo-Marxist revolutionary party enthralled by Marx’s ends-justify-means modus operandi, a press that functions as the public relations arm of the revolution, and a couple members of the opposition party who are so blinded by fury at the then-oval-office rascal to the point of cooperating with the revolution. Stephen King couldn’t come up with a more dramatic cast of characters for a thriller . . . or horror show.
Or maybe Clarence Thomas’s assessment is more accurate when he described his “Borking” as a “high-tech lynching”. Revolutionary parties seldom have scruples when the revolution is all that matters. For them, a “lynching” is just fine.
RogerG
*Andrew C. McCarthy’s column on the Cipollone testimony: https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/07/the-january-6-committees-gamesmanship-on-cipollones-testimony/