Where the hell was Bill Barr?
It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to report that based on its hearing this morning, the House 1/6 Committee is failing to take advantage of the majesty of their mission as a congressional committee investigating the biggest political scandal since Watergate. The entire time I watched the hearing today I was wondering, who is picking the committee’s witnesses? I don’t mean the ones they’re showing on video tape. I mean the witnesses they call to stand before the committee, take an oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and sit down to be questioned live and in person on national television.
There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that compares with the moments of majesty and drama that attach to a really good hearing on Capitol Hill. You hardly need to think back over the moments that have gone down in history – in the Army-McCarthy hearings, in the midst of one of McCarthy’s rants against an innocent victim of political slander, the Army counsel interrupted him and said, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?” During the Watergate hearings, there was the moment that White House aide Alexander Butterfield unexpectedly blurted out the secret that there was a White House taping system that had recorded every word ever said in the Oval Office.
I could go on, but you get the idea. The one thing all those historical moments shared was that they happened live on camera before a congressional committee with a live audience in the hearing room as well as television cameras – in the case of Watergate, covering the hearing live.
And so this morning I turned on the TV to watch what I hoped would be a similarly dramatic event, only to watch as a former Fox News political editor was sworn in to testify about how he and his “team” had made the call that Joe Biden won Arizona. Just between you and me, we already knew this. Many watching today were probably watching on the night of November 3, 2020 when it happened. Why did we need to hear it again, and why did we need to hear it live in the hearing room from an obviously very-pleased-with-himself former Fox employee?
Why, indeed, was the testimony of one Chris Stirewalt – someone we will never hear of again – so important that he had to appear in person, and yet the testimony of the former Attorney General of the United States, William Barr, so lacking in importance that he was presented on a big television screen being questioned by committee staff months ago in an office somewhere in Washington? Why wasn’t Barr required to march through the hearing room to the witness table, asked to raise his right hand and to swear he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and then asked the questions that elicited the responses he gave on tape that made news – that he had told Trump his lies about winning the election were bullshit, and all the rest of it? Why wasn’t Barr put on the spot before the live cameras and asked, why did you resign your position as attorney general in early December of 2020 almost immediately after having given an interview to the AP saying that the DOJ had found no evidence of fraud that would change the outcome of the election?
A name that came up several times today and also last Thursday evening, but whose presence was missing in the committee hearing room both times was Pat Cipollone, the former White House counsel. He was at multiple meetings in the Oval Office with Trump. He was mentioned as one of the so-called “Team Normal” within the White House who did not believe the election had been stolen. Why wasn’t he sworn in and put in the witness chair to give us the details, while instead we were treated to live testimony from an election official from Philadelphia named Al Schmidt, whose testimony seemed to consist of recounting all the threats he and his family received on Twitter from right-wing loons after Trump called him a RINO and criticized him for not joining in on the Big Lie about the election. That’s it. He had no personal knowledge of anything beyond the fact that a whole bunch of dead people did not vote in Philadelphia, just one of the countless lies Trump was spreading after he lost, and yet he was the one – not Barr and not Cippollone – who was called to testify in person.
We heard some fairly interesting testimony from Alex Cannon, a former lawyer for Trump’s campaign, about how neither he nor any of the other campaign legal staff believed there had been fraud in the election, and he told a pretty good story about being yelled at on the phone by Peter Navarro – but of course we saw Cannon not in person in the hearing room, but only on a big screen while he was apparently being interviewed by committee staff some time ago. Why wasn’t he called and asked some probing questions about why he came to believe that the election had not been stolen? I heard a comment later after the hearing that he had been fired from the campaign legal staff. Why wasn’t he asked about his firing? Who ordered it? What was the reason he was given for his firing?
Similarly, we heard on tape from Richard Donoghue, former deputy attorney general, who testified that he had debunked one Trump conspiracy theory after another about fraud in multiple states, including the one from Georgia about a “suitcase” full of ballots that wasn’t a suitcase but a lockbox for safekeeping ballots properly used in every election for that purpose. Donoghue told us that every time he shot down one of Trump’s fraud theories, Trump came up with another one.
Where was Donoghue? He worked under Attorney General Barr and seemed to agree with him that all of the stories about election fraud were false stories being spread primarily by the president of the United States, and he was in the room with Trump listening to him and responding to his lies in real time. That would seem to me to be excellent fodder for live testimony, not a grainy image on a big screen over the heads of the members of the committee.
There is one other thing that rankles me about the two hearings we’ve seen, and that is the way they’re organized. First we heard introductions from members – today it was Zoe Lofgren and Liz Cheney – that basically said, here’s what you’re going to hear today. Then they presented their largely-taped testimony, and then we heard summations from the same members that said, here’s what we told you today.
If these hearings were being carried out the way I think they should, we wouldn’t need to be instructed and then reminded about what’s going on. We would be listening to it live coming out of the mouths of real-life witnesses who have been sworn in and are giving testimony under questioning by members of the committee.
People like William Barr and Pat Cippollone and Richard Donoghue, all three of whom were present and in the room when Donald Trump was conspiring to steal the election of 2020. I’d be willing to bet if they were put on the spot under the lights in the majesty of a hearing room on Capitol Hill, they would have more to tell us than we’ve heard from them so far, and we have the right to hear their testimony live and in person and under the pressure a congressional hearing brings with it in spades.
Sorry to disagree with you Lucien but given that Stepian’s important testimony was postponed last minute, the committee had to do some juggling of their presentation and I believe did a masterful job of presenting damaging videotaped statements from Barr and others. Not sure at this point if it mattered whether it was sworn testimony or not. Beyond this, I was an investigator in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and was trained in the common and acceptable way to make a presentation: “tell them what your going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them”.
And give the witness a chance to weasel, retract, prevaricate, take the 5th? Gotta disagree, especially when they were making it up on the fly. And with a jury you tell them the story in opening, tell them the story through testimony, and tell them the story at closing. Especially in this era of short attention spans, redundancy has value. Along with repetitiveness. And redundancy!