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.
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!
Oh come on. Be reasonable. The witnesses testified under oath, whether live or in depositions. Bill Barr was the most effective witness against Trump. He buried him. There is no difference between live testimony and a deposition. Non attorneys don't understand this. The Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure provide that a deposition is the same as court testimony.
The first hearing was great. Totally disagree with the idea they are flubbing it. The second hearing I listened to while semi-asleep as it came into Hawaii at four o’clock in the morning. Sounded great to me. An open-and-shut case has already been made that Trump is as guilty as sin. I hope the Department of Justice tries and convicts Trump. It’s all there in the hearings.
Lest we forget, Attorney General Barr was the fellow who trashed the Mueller Report. When all was said and done, a Federal Judge who had access to the redacted portions of the report said that Barr's "misleading" statements about the reports led him to suspect that Barr had tried to establish a "One sided narrative favorable to Trump. To which Barr probably retorted his favorite line, bullshit.
I believe the answer to why none of the big names are on the list is simple. They would have to be subpoenaed and every one would have refused. Given how our judicial system works it would be 2026 before anyone would be sworn in.
I dare say we have shorter attention spans than we did in 1973 and different ways we get information. Sound bites and tweets are the currency of communication nowadays. I’m old school and would have loved to watched Barr sweat it out all day but am ok with a highlight reel.
This committee, more than any other hearings I've watched/heard, are making a case (not necessarily why 1/6 happened) but a case against Donald Trump.
During the 1st hearing I didn't think I liked how the process was going, I wasn't sure it was attention grabbing enough.
This 2nd hearing is when I figured it was all about making the case (like Anthony Damian said “tell them what your going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them”.
You may laugh at the reason I believe they didn't have Bill Barr in the room...
He would have taken all the oxygen out of the room. Zoe Lofgren made a point of saying they had "hours of testimony" from Barr. Even in the edited clip they show of Barr you could see his self-important bloviating. If Barr was in the room live he would have taken over the hearing and it would have been all about him.
Two people who should be put in front and center: Michael Flynn-along with Rudy Giuliani, who is probably the one person who deserves every punishment known to law for his role in this. The two of them conspired to keep Trump rolling, and along the way they spread so much shit the cows were revolted.
But I agree-these hearings are pretty low key, and I don't know if that's by design or accident. If the motive was to get eyes and ears on them, it's not very effective, but if the reason is they have enough testimony to get charges laid out for the indictment, that's why it's so boring.
Because they have the videotaped testimony of Barr, etc, and bringing him back wouldn't make it any different..he'd be repeating the same things in public. He was under oath, and he was supposed to tell the truth, doing it again wouldn't make it any more official.
What we haven't seen is the testimony from Giuliani, and others involved-and perhaps that's the big finale which will nail the coffin shut.
We can only hope they know what they're doing. I want to see Trump prosecuted, even if Merrick Garland does not.
Bill 'Bullshit' Barr bears a strong resemblance to disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law, when he ran the Catholic archdiocese in Boston thirty years ago. Cardinal Law, many will remember, was the cleric who turned a blind eye to pedophile priests, moving them around from parish to parish, as complaints about sexual abuse accumulated. Anyone who is seen the movie 'Spotlight' can relate to the story.
William Barr was Attorney General under George HW Bush, and he was too young a man for the job. His Catholic upbringing and education made him a religious conservative; but it also made him a conniver and an operator along the lines of Cardinal Woolsey during the reign of Henry VIII. For each of them, the position was all about power — how to acquire it, how to use it, how to hoard it, and how to keep others from getting it. We see this trait in Barr early on; his inherent dishonesty, his corner cutting, his disdain for legal norms if they don't suit him, his casuistry, and his utter cynicism. Bill Barr acted as President Trump's in-house lawyer until he realized how self-destructive Trump had become in his quest for reelection. Barr was good with anything that Trump wanted to do so long as it increased Barr's power and influence.
Barr was an aficionado of a constitutional theory based upon the primacy of the executive, and the inherency of executive power at the expense of the other two branches of government. There were others like him, styling their thinking as the 'theory of the unitary executive', in which all of the functions of government were subordinate to the powers of the executive. The central idea is that government is a unitary institution not differentiated by its constituent parts. In the United States that has never been true; but in ancient times, that unity of power was characteristic of Imperial Rome. In modern times, that is not a president, it is a Caesar, or Czar. More to the point, the Framers of the American Constitution placed Congress as first among equals within the enumerated branches of American government.
The problem that a civil Republic like the United States has, is keeping ambitious men with monarchial pretensions out of office, and away from the levers of power. For men like William Barr, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, the ultimate stimulant, the sublime self-identification with civil government. What men such as Barr fail to realize, apart from the aphorism coined by Lord Acton, that 'Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely', that absolute power over men does not make them any more powerful in the world of circumstance and fate; and as to such men, unlimited power over other men does not make them invulnerable to the laws of nature. For such men, frustration and cruelty balance out whatever power those men exercise over other men. They become tyrants, and in doing so, they offer an open invitation to other men to bring them down.
Whatever commendation Bill Barr is due for telling Donald Trump that he lost his bid for reelection fairly and in accordance with the rules, Barr deserves censure for the way he handled his job under the two presidency served.
Barr's demeanor during his interview with the January 6 committee staff displays an odd mixture of professional competency and dismissiveness and contempt when it came to dealing with the former president. And yet, William Barr was willing to remain among the men he despised as long as he stayed close enough to exercise political power for himself. His willingness to testify using the expletive 'bullshit' to describe Trump's fixation on staying in office translates well into Barr's overall contempt for the former president, the men around the president, Senators and Members of Congress, and the entire governmental enterprise itself. That kind of monumental ego is utterly antithetical to the idea of constitutional government.
I disagree with you on the need for brevity and conciseness. The heart of Watergate was the disclosure by Alexander Butterfield that the Nixon White House had a voice activated audio taping system; and what followed was was a months-long legal battle over access to the tapes. In the parlance of the law, those tapes were the 'best evidence'. What followed was the appointment of Archibald Cox as Special Counsel, who lost his job in the infamous 'Saturday Night Massacre', by the Solicitor General Robert Bork, acting at President Richard Nixon's direction. The resulting political firestorm, as we know, forced Nixon to backtrack and allow the appointment of a replacement in Leon Jaworski, a well respected Texan, on November 1, 1973. The Federal Courts ruled that Nixon's refusal to turn over the tapes, culminating in a unanimous Supreme Court decision against Nixon.
Time is not on our side. The committee has a mountain range of evidence that needs to be sifted and channeled into its appropriate narrative thread. Rather than proceeding on broad based front, the committee is proceeding on an 'island hopping campaign' that cuts to the heart of the matter by focusing on Trump's multi-part strategy that ultimately failed. We don't need to get into the trenches to say how, because the gambit failed in each instance. It's unfair to those who gave their all to save our Constitution and our democracy, but the focus needs to remain on Trump's thwarted plans. We end upon the day in December, which by rule is the deadline for contesting federal elections; and thence to... "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December"... to cast their votes, which certification of said votes is transmitted to the President ofthe Senate; thence to January 5, the day before the official counting of the Electoral College ballots, and we reprise the final preparations for the assault on the Capitol.
The following day the Insurrection occurred. What's relevant is that Trump's working on Plan G, the last one, as Plans A through F had failed. We'll learn about each of them. Plan F, getting Vice President Mike Pence to throw out ballots of contested states and return them back to those states' legislature was a last gasp effort to manipulate the law. Once Pence had dug in his heels, it was 'go for broke', 'all in', or however you might want to characterize the attack on the Capitol.
At some point, the January 6 committee is going to issue a final report. How far along they are by now is anybody's guess, but they are racing against time. The committee needs to make its case before the November elections. We have no choice other than to put the continuation of our Nation's democracy on the ballot and forth voters to choose between continuing to believe Donald Trump's lies, and the lies of those who support him, and those of us who believe that democracy must endure. We need to remember, each of us, that Trump and his minions nearly succeeded in destroying our democratic institutions. We need to hope and pray that our fellow citizens agree with us that Trump's Republican Party should not be given another chance to destroy the American Constitution. It's that serious.
The committee did a bang up job in showing that Trump knew that he lost the election, and it was potent to have the roster of Republicans in his close orbit say as much, over and over again. The committee also did a great job of showing that the “Stop the Steal” movement was created for the sole purpose of lining Donald Trump’s damp pockets. They effectively highlighted that the so-called “Election Defense Fund” was a mirage intended to sucker small-time donors (and did). And that wire-fraud may have been committed. It was a pleasure watching the roster of rats, headed by Bill Barr, back-pedal and pretend that they have a moral compass, when in fact they aided and abetted the melting sack of ice at the center of this story. And, as many others have said, we live in a era when a moral outrage soundbite, taken out of context, can be damning, and I applaud the committee for being careful not to overreach.
Lucian, this is the most frustrating column of yours I've read yet -- actually, it's maybe the *first* frustrating column of yours I've read.
Keep in mind that those iconic moments from the Army-McCarthy and the Watergate hearings didn't come out of nowhere. They had context. The overwhelming majority of us never saw or don't remember the context. We see those moments (over and over again) as soundbites. They didn't start out that way.
The 1/6 committee is building a case. This isn't a show trial -- of course the Republicans are calling it that even though it isn't, but if it was they would have a point. One remarkable thing about yesterday's hearing is that so many of those testifying were Republicans, members of the 45 administration. Their testimony ws all the more damning for that. *Of course* I'm thinking "WTH were you guys thinking, working for that administration?" Others are probably thinking it too. But what purpose would be served by rubbing their noses in it and getting them to admit on camera that the last four years of their lives, and maybe their whole adult lives, were misspent?
Of the 20 million (or so) viewers, I bet only a small fraction remember the specifics of what went down in the days after the election. Even those of us who remember at least some of it don't have the full context, which includes what happened next, up till 1/6 and beyond.
This is a hearing, not a trial. Maybe more important, it's not just about a scandal; it's about a serious and ongoing threat to U.S. democracy. The committee knows that, and it's reflected in how they're structuring the hearings. So far I've been very impressed.
I am tempted to agree, but having tried cases to juries in state and federal courts, and having participated in Senate hearings, the people who need to be persuaded here are so deliberately benighted that they unfortunately require that type of before, during and after style of repetition.
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!
Oh come on. Be reasonable. The witnesses testified under oath, whether live or in depositions. Bill Barr was the most effective witness against Trump. He buried him. There is no difference between live testimony and a deposition. Non attorneys don't understand this. The Federal Rules of Civil and Criminal Procedure provide that a deposition is the same as court testimony.
The first hearing was great. Totally disagree with the idea they are flubbing it. The second hearing I listened to while semi-asleep as it came into Hawaii at four o’clock in the morning. Sounded great to me. An open-and-shut case has already been made that Trump is as guilty as sin. I hope the Department of Justice tries and convicts Trump. It’s all there in the hearings.
Lest we forget, Attorney General Barr was the fellow who trashed the Mueller Report. When all was said and done, a Federal Judge who had access to the redacted portions of the report said that Barr's "misleading" statements about the reports led him to suspect that Barr had tried to establish a "One sided narrative favorable to Trump. To which Barr probably retorted his favorite line, bullshit.
I believe the answer to why none of the big names are on the list is simple. They would have to be subpoenaed and every one would have refused. Given how our judicial system works it would be 2026 before anyone would be sworn in.
The one guy that I would like to see live is Mike Pence! Game changer!
I dare say we have shorter attention spans than we did in 1973 and different ways we get information. Sound bites and tweets are the currency of communication nowadays. I’m old school and would have loved to watched Barr sweat it out all day but am ok with a highlight reel.
This committee, more than any other hearings I've watched/heard, are making a case (not necessarily why 1/6 happened) but a case against Donald Trump.
During the 1st hearing I didn't think I liked how the process was going, I wasn't sure it was attention grabbing enough.
This 2nd hearing is when I figured it was all about making the case (like Anthony Damian said “tell them what your going to tell them, tell them and then tell them what you told them”.
You may laugh at the reason I believe they didn't have Bill Barr in the room...
He would have taken all the oxygen out of the room. Zoe Lofgren made a point of saying they had "hours of testimony" from Barr. Even in the edited clip they show of Barr you could see his self-important bloviating. If Barr was in the room live he would have taken over the hearing and it would have been all about him.
Two people who should be put in front and center: Michael Flynn-along with Rudy Giuliani, who is probably the one person who deserves every punishment known to law for his role in this. The two of them conspired to keep Trump rolling, and along the way they spread so much shit the cows were revolted.
But I agree-these hearings are pretty low key, and I don't know if that's by design or accident. If the motive was to get eyes and ears on them, it's not very effective, but if the reason is they have enough testimony to get charges laid out for the indictment, that's why it's so boring.
Because they have the videotaped testimony of Barr, etc, and bringing him back wouldn't make it any different..he'd be repeating the same things in public. He was under oath, and he was supposed to tell the truth, doing it again wouldn't make it any more official.
What we haven't seen is the testimony from Giuliani, and others involved-and perhaps that's the big finale which will nail the coffin shut.
We can only hope they know what they're doing. I want to see Trump prosecuted, even if Merrick Garland does not.
Bill 'Bullshit' Barr bears a strong resemblance to disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law, when he ran the Catholic archdiocese in Boston thirty years ago. Cardinal Law, many will remember, was the cleric who turned a blind eye to pedophile priests, moving them around from parish to parish, as complaints about sexual abuse accumulated. Anyone who is seen the movie 'Spotlight' can relate to the story.
William Barr was Attorney General under George HW Bush, and he was too young a man for the job. His Catholic upbringing and education made him a religious conservative; but it also made him a conniver and an operator along the lines of Cardinal Woolsey during the reign of Henry VIII. For each of them, the position was all about power — how to acquire it, how to use it, how to hoard it, and how to keep others from getting it. We see this trait in Barr early on; his inherent dishonesty, his corner cutting, his disdain for legal norms if they don't suit him, his casuistry, and his utter cynicism. Bill Barr acted as President Trump's in-house lawyer until he realized how self-destructive Trump had become in his quest for reelection. Barr was good with anything that Trump wanted to do so long as it increased Barr's power and influence.
Barr was an aficionado of a constitutional theory based upon the primacy of the executive, and the inherency of executive power at the expense of the other two branches of government. There were others like him, styling their thinking as the 'theory of the unitary executive', in which all of the functions of government were subordinate to the powers of the executive. The central idea is that government is a unitary institution not differentiated by its constituent parts. In the United States that has never been true; but in ancient times, that unity of power was characteristic of Imperial Rome. In modern times, that is not a president, it is a Caesar, or Czar. More to the point, the Framers of the American Constitution placed Congress as first among equals within the enumerated branches of American government.
The problem that a civil Republic like the United States has, is keeping ambitious men with monarchial pretensions out of office, and away from the levers of power. For men like William Barr, power is the ultimate aphrodisiac, the ultimate stimulant, the sublime self-identification with civil government. What men such as Barr fail to realize, apart from the aphorism coined by Lord Acton, that 'Power tends to corrupt; and absolute power corrupts absolutely', that absolute power over men does not make them any more powerful in the world of circumstance and fate; and as to such men, unlimited power over other men does not make them invulnerable to the laws of nature. For such men, frustration and cruelty balance out whatever power those men exercise over other men. They become tyrants, and in doing so, they offer an open invitation to other men to bring them down.
Whatever commendation Bill Barr is due for telling Donald Trump that he lost his bid for reelection fairly and in accordance with the rules, Barr deserves censure for the way he handled his job under the two presidency served.
Barr's demeanor during his interview with the January 6 committee staff displays an odd mixture of professional competency and dismissiveness and contempt when it came to dealing with the former president. And yet, William Barr was willing to remain among the men he despised as long as he stayed close enough to exercise political power for himself. His willingness to testify using the expletive 'bullshit' to describe Trump's fixation on staying in office translates well into Barr's overall contempt for the former president, the men around the president, Senators and Members of Congress, and the entire governmental enterprise itself. That kind of monumental ego is utterly antithetical to the idea of constitutional government.
I disagree with you on the need for brevity and conciseness. The heart of Watergate was the disclosure by Alexander Butterfield that the Nixon White House had a voice activated audio taping system; and what followed was was a months-long legal battle over access to the tapes. In the parlance of the law, those tapes were the 'best evidence'. What followed was the appointment of Archibald Cox as Special Counsel, who lost his job in the infamous 'Saturday Night Massacre', by the Solicitor General Robert Bork, acting at President Richard Nixon's direction. The resulting political firestorm, as we know, forced Nixon to backtrack and allow the appointment of a replacement in Leon Jaworski, a well respected Texan, on November 1, 1973. The Federal Courts ruled that Nixon's refusal to turn over the tapes, culminating in a unanimous Supreme Court decision against Nixon.
Time is not on our side. The committee has a mountain range of evidence that needs to be sifted and channeled into its appropriate narrative thread. Rather than proceeding on broad based front, the committee is proceeding on an 'island hopping campaign' that cuts to the heart of the matter by focusing on Trump's multi-part strategy that ultimately failed. We don't need to get into the trenches to say how, because the gambit failed in each instance. It's unfair to those who gave their all to save our Constitution and our democracy, but the focus needs to remain on Trump's thwarted plans. We end upon the day in December, which by rule is the deadline for contesting federal elections; and thence to... "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December"... to cast their votes, which certification of said votes is transmitted to the President ofthe Senate; thence to January 5, the day before the official counting of the Electoral College ballots, and we reprise the final preparations for the assault on the Capitol.
The following day the Insurrection occurred. What's relevant is that Trump's working on Plan G, the last one, as Plans A through F had failed. We'll learn about each of them. Plan F, getting Vice President Mike Pence to throw out ballots of contested states and return them back to those states' legislature was a last gasp effort to manipulate the law. Once Pence had dug in his heels, it was 'go for broke', 'all in', or however you might want to characterize the attack on the Capitol.
At some point, the January 6 committee is going to issue a final report. How far along they are by now is anybody's guess, but they are racing against time. The committee needs to make its case before the November elections. We have no choice other than to put the continuation of our Nation's democracy on the ballot and forth voters to choose between continuing to believe Donald Trump's lies, and the lies of those who support him, and those of us who believe that democracy must endure. We need to remember, each of us, that Trump and his minions nearly succeeded in destroying our democratic institutions. We need to hope and pray that our fellow citizens agree with us that Trump's Republican Party should not be given another chance to destroy the American Constitution. It's that serious.
The committee did a bang up job in showing that Trump knew that he lost the election, and it was potent to have the roster of Republicans in his close orbit say as much, over and over again. The committee also did a great job of showing that the “Stop the Steal” movement was created for the sole purpose of lining Donald Trump’s damp pockets. They effectively highlighted that the so-called “Election Defense Fund” was a mirage intended to sucker small-time donors (and did). And that wire-fraud may have been committed. It was a pleasure watching the roster of rats, headed by Bill Barr, back-pedal and pretend that they have a moral compass, when in fact they aided and abetted the melting sack of ice at the center of this story. And, as many others have said, we live in a era when a moral outrage soundbite, taken out of context, can be damning, and I applaud the committee for being careful not to overreach.
Don't forget, in 1973 there was no cable competition and no national network specifically created to lie to the nation.
Lucian, this is the most frustrating column of yours I've read yet -- actually, it's maybe the *first* frustrating column of yours I've read.
Keep in mind that those iconic moments from the Army-McCarthy and the Watergate hearings didn't come out of nowhere. They had context. The overwhelming majority of us never saw or don't remember the context. We see those moments (over and over again) as soundbites. They didn't start out that way.
The 1/6 committee is building a case. This isn't a show trial -- of course the Republicans are calling it that even though it isn't, but if it was they would have a point. One remarkable thing about yesterday's hearing is that so many of those testifying were Republicans, members of the 45 administration. Their testimony ws all the more damning for that. *Of course* I'm thinking "WTH were you guys thinking, working for that administration?" Others are probably thinking it too. But what purpose would be served by rubbing their noses in it and getting them to admit on camera that the last four years of their lives, and maybe their whole adult lives, were misspent?
Of the 20 million (or so) viewers, I bet only a small fraction remember the specifics of what went down in the days after the election. Even those of us who remember at least some of it don't have the full context, which includes what happened next, up till 1/6 and beyond.
This is a hearing, not a trial. Maybe more important, it's not just about a scandal; it's about a serious and ongoing threat to U.S. democracy. The committee knows that, and it's reflected in how they're structuring the hearings. So far I've been very impressed.
I am tempted to agree, but having tried cases to juries in state and federal courts, and having participated in Senate hearings, the people who need to be persuaded here are so deliberately benighted that they unfortunately require that type of before, during and after style of repetition.