We are all on the 1/6 grand jury

When I’m not unpacking boxes or on my way to or from Lowe’s or spelunking through the depths of Walmart in search of stuff like labels and Sharpies and plastic storage bins or glued to the TV watching coverage of the 1/6 Committee’s machinations, I’ve been buried up to my earlobes in “Watergate:  A New History” by Garrett M. Graff, a former editor at Politico and Washingtonian Magazine. 

That’s how I figured out what the 1/6 Committee is really up to.  I expressed some disappointment a couple of days ago with how they’re conducting their hearings.  It has bothered me from the get-go that they’ve scheduled only six or seven of them, and they only last two hours, instead of the day-long spectacle that mesmerized the nation when the Senate held the Watergate hearings.  And I complained that they’re not calling enough live witnesses, and they’re using taped depositions too much.

Then I hit this line in the new Watergate history: “Witness after witness paraded through the grand jury as subpoenas rained down on everyone…”  I thought back to the summer of 1972.  I remembered that the Department of Justice had empaneled a grand jury, and I knew the FBI was interviewing witnesses, but I had no idea how broadly they were casting their net.  “Witness after witness”…what does that remind me of?

Of course!  The 1/6 Committee!  It’s in the record that they’ve interviewed at least a thousand witnesses!  Over the past year, we’ve seen footage of some of the biggies going in and out of the room where they’re conducting interviews – people like Bannon and Stone and Barr and the other big names.  But somewhere in Washington, there has been a parade of witnesses, just like there was in Watergate.  We’ve heard bits and pieces – they talked to this White House aide and that deputy assistant attorney general and more people who worked on the Trump campaign than we suspected. 

And then it came to me.  They’ve effectively been running a grand jury up there on Capitol Hill.  They’re doing the DOJ’s job for them.  And now with the hearings on TV, we’re the grand jurors.  We’ve been treated to dribs and drabs of leaks over the months, but now it’s coming at us in a steady flow.  We’re hearing names we haven’t heard before, like the former White House counsel Eric Herschmann who took a bite out of John Eastman’s ass in a conversation we’re just now hearing about that took place on January 7, the day after the attack on the Capitol.  Who the hell is he?  Where did he come from?

And then I flipped back through the recent pages I read in “Watergate:  A New History,” and there they were:  people I had never heard of before, who never testified before the Senate Watergate committee, but who ended up playing key roles in the investigation nevertheless.  Peggy Gleason was one of them.  Ever heard of her?  Me neither.  But she was a worker bee on the Nixon campaign, somebody people like John Dean and Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt passed in the halls without even noticing her.

But she noticed them.  She was interviewed by the FBI at the CREEP (Committee to Re-elect the President) headquarters and didn’t say much, but later the same night, she went to a pay phone in her neighborhood and called the FBI agent she had talked to and he drove over and picked her up on the street, and they drove around for two hours while she spilled her guts about the shenanigans that were going on with the Nixon campaign. “When the car got too hot to bear,” Graff reports, “they retreated to a Holiday Inn, where Gleason spoke for seven more hours about what had transpired inside CREEP both before and after the break-in.”

Nine hours. And she turned them on to Judy Hoback – ever heard of her?  Me neither – an accountant on the Nixon campaign, and she “talk(ed) until 3 a.m. about the oddities of the campaign’s financing, its plentiful cash reserves, and McCord and Liddy’s involvement.”  Another five or six hours. 

And then a guy whose name I do remember, Al Baldwin, cracked.  He was one of the “look-outs” at the Howard Johnson’s Hotel across the street from the Watergate, listening to the taps the burglars had installed and he was one of the guys who warned them the cops were on the way the night they got busted.  Baldwin gave the FBI enough to arrest Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy for masterminding the break-in at the DNC headquarters, but they held off, theorizing that the conspiracy went higher than those two.

Oh, boy, did it. 

That’s where we are right now with the 1/6 Committee and its hearings.  We’re hearing names we haven’t heard before, and we’re being tantalized by stuff like they released today on Barry Loudermilk, the Republican congressman from Georgia who denied he or any other Republican on the face of the earth led any “reconnaissance tours” on January 5 – until the committee released video footage today of exactly that:  Loudermilk not only leading a reconnaissance tour, but escorting a man who was studiously photographing stairways, doors to the offices of Democrats like Gerald Nadler, security check-points and corridors leading to the Capitol tram system.  That’s what he photographed on the 5th.  On the 6th, the day of the assault on the Capitol, Loudermilk’s “tour” guest photographed himself in the process of assaulting the Capitol and threatening to rip out the hair of Nancy Pelosi and threatening, on video, “There’s no escape, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler. We’re coming for you.”

Loudermilk, of course, had lied repeatedly that he never conducted any tours of Capitol buildings at any time before 1/6 and even went so far as to file a House ethics complaint against Democratic Representative Mikie Sherrill for accusing Republicans of leading tours through the Capitol complex while it was closed to the public on January 5.  Today Loudermilk piled one lie atop another by claiming in a statement to reporters that he had not talked to the 1/6 Committee because “they haven’t asked me.”  Members of the committee quickly shot that lie down by telling reporters that Loudermilk had been asked no less than three times to be interviewed by the committee.  He never responded to their requests.

Just like it did in Watergate, evidence is accumulating, step by step, interview by interview, and these days, video by video.  A thousand witness interviews?  That’s some real diligence right there.  No wonder they postponed today’s hearing.  They’re still connecting the dots because they’ve got so many dots to connect, that’s why. 

One of the things that rankled me the other day was that the committee didn’t have former Attorney General William Barr in person to testify.  Instead, they showed video of his deposition in a room with committee lawyers and staff on one side of a big table, Barr and his lawyers on the other.  One of the commentators after the hearing pointed out Barr’s arrogant, flippant body language and attitude during his interview, something I had noticed but simply found distasteful. 

Now I see it in an entirely different way.  Barr was being questioned by staff from a congressional committee for whom he lacked respect.  That’s why they caught him bragging about telling the president of the United States that his lies about the election were “bullshit” and “nonsense” and that he “was detached from reality.”  That’s the way arrogant assholes behave when they think they’re the smartest guy in the room and they’ve got nothing to lose.

But put William Barr before a grand jury and it would be an entirely different matter.  He would never tell a grand jury what he told the House 1/6 committee staff.  They got more out of him, and doubtlessly more out of countless other witnesses, than any grand jury would have ever heard.

The House 1/6 Committee is doing the DOJ’s job for them, and that’s a very, very good thing, because evidence is evidence.  Sworn testimony is sworn testimony.  The only condition on the information accumulated by the 1/6 Committee in its investigations is that it cannot be used against the witnesses who gave it to them.

No problem, because the ones who talked to the committee aren’t the ones facing legal jeopardy.  It’s the people they talked about who have reason to fear the evidence they gave. 

What Merrick Garland and his prosecutors will do with the treasure trove of indictable offenses being accumulated and made public by the 1/6 Committee remains to be seen.  In the meantime, we are not only grand jurors, we have the power of prosecutors, judge and jury all at once with our votes.