Why the hell hasn't the House Jan. 6 committee held hearings? What are they waiting for?

The Watergate hearings were on TV every day for months.

We have a model.  We know what to do when there has been an assault on our democracy and a cascading Constitutional crisis because we’ve done it before with Watergate.  The break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters took place on June 17, 1972.  The Nixon White House and his campaign denied any connection to the break-in for months thereafter, even though reporting in the Washington Post and New York Times began establishing such a connection almost immediately after it happened.

Nixon won re-election in November of 1972 in a landslide, taking 49 of 50 states.  But by the new year, pressure was building to look into what had happened that night at the Watergate, who ordered the break in, who funded it, and what other illegal activities the Nixon campaign had engaged in.  The Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, which became known as the Watergate Committee, was formed on February 7, 1973.  It took only three months for hearings by the committee to begin on May 17, 1973. 

The Watergate Committee held 15 weeks of hearings, taking a recess in August and recessing briefly again in October.  The hearings were initially broadcast live by all three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC.  Later, the networks broadcast the hearings live on a rotating basis.  PBS re-broadcast the hearings on tape nightly, and National Public Radio stations around the nation carried the hearings live daily.  Some 319 hours of hearings would be broadcast in all.  85 percent of U.S. homes watched at least part of the hearings.  

During the October recess, the “Saturday Night Massacre” took place, when Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire him and resigned, followed quickly by his replacement, William Ruckelshaus, who also refused the order.   

The House Judiciary Committee had already begun meeting to discuss whether Richard Nixon should face impeachment.  On October 27, the Watergate hearings resumed with testimony by Archibald Cox, who described in detail Nixon’s refusal to produce documents and tapes necessary to the prosecution of Watergate burglars and others.  John Dean, the White House counsel who had testified about Nixon’s role in the Watergate coverup, pled guilty to obstruction of justice.  Bail was denied to five of the original Watergate burglars who had pled guilty to charges related to the break-in.  Three major corporations, American Airlines, Goodyear, and 3M, pled guilty to making illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign.

In November, the Watergate Committee held its final hearings on campaign finance violations by the Nixon campaign.  Senator Edward Brooke became the first Republican to publicly call for Nixon’s resignation.  Time Magazine, which had never before published an editorial in its pages, called for Nixon’s resignation.

I remember very well what those months were like.  The Watergate Committee had the country’s attention and did not let go.  The hearings were a daily event.  If you couldn’t watch them live during the day or listen to them on NPR, you watched the reruns on PBS at night.  The newspapers were filled with headlines from the committee.  There was the revelation of the White House tapes.  John Dean testified that Nixon ran the cover-up from the Oval Office.  Nixon’s top aides, John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, were questioned for days and mainly tried to lay blame for the cover-up of the Watergate break-in on Dean. 

The former CIA director, Richard Helms, testified that the CIA was asked by the White House to pay the bail for the Watergate burglars and put them on the CIA payroll during the time they spent in jail.  He testified that he was told by Haldeman to tell the director of the FBI that investigating the Watergate break in might interfere with CIA operations in Mexico.  The Mexican end of the investigation turned out to be the tracing of four checks from a Miami bank that ended up in the account of one of the Watergate burglars.  The director of the FBI testified that Ehrlichman and Dean had given him documents from Howard Hunt’s safe that were described as “dynamite.”  The FBI director ended up destroying the documents.  Ehrlichman denied that he told him to do it.

On and on the testimony went.  This guy said that guy did something illegal.  That guy denied it, then another guy came in and said both of them lied and it actually happened another way entirely.  You could watch the committee receiving new information in real time, some of it contradictory, some of it clearly false, some obviously true.  A former Attorney General, Richard Kleindienst, gave testimony directly contradicting public statements by Nixon.  So did the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the criminal division, Henry Petersen.  Both of these men were prominent figures in the Republican Party.  Both held top law enforcement jobs in the Nixon administration.  To hear them separately essentially call the President of the United States a liar – back when telling lies was something you didn’t want to get caught doing – was remarkable in a way that’s difficult to describe today.

I’ll tell you what’s not difficult to describe, however, and that is the frustration I feel daily as I watch one report after another about what is going on almost entirely behind the scenes with the Jan. 6 committee.  I just saw a report that the committee will meet later tonight and vote to hold Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, in contempt for refusing the committee’s subpoena to produce documents and testify.  This has happened twice before, with Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Clark, the former deputy attorney general in charge of the Civil Division.  Clark has said he will invoke his privilege under the Fifth Amendment.  Now they’ve subpoenaed InfoWars loon Alex Jones and Russia-gate conspirator Roger Stone and the heads of the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and the First Amendment Praetorian. 

All these people, every single one of them, should be called before the committee and questioned in a public hearing with full media coverage.  If they refuse to testify using the Fifth, then they should be made to cite the privilege in answer to every question the committee has.  If they claim phony executive privilege, they should be required to do so in answer to specific questions about their activities prior to and on the day of the insurrection.

Watching the Watergate hearings, you could tell when Ehrlichman and Haldeman and the rest of them were lying.  They got angry at the questions they were asked.  They were angry that they were even being questioned at all!  You could see it on their faces and you could hear their contempt for the committee in their tone of voice and in the answers they gave. 

That was the way the American people got educated about Watergate and came to understand that it was bigger than a break-in at the offices of a political party.  It was a crime followed by a series of other crimes that went right to the top of the United States government.  The men who were involved were some of the most powerful people on the planet.  The lies they told to cover-up what they had done were not just crimes like perjury.  They were an all-out assault on the truth and on the legitimacy of our government, our congress, the judiciary, and democracy itself.  And you could watch it happen in real time and hear it in their voices and see it on their faces.

The House Select Committee on Jan. 6 has held one public hearing in more than five months.  Everything we know about what they are doing and what they are finding out is coming from informal statements made by committee members and from leaks.  We haven’t seen a single person involved in the planning for the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol testify in person.  We know they’re lying, because they tell their lies in public and even in books they have written, like Mark Meadows, but we haven’t seen them questioned by the committee or heard them try to avoid telling their lies under oath by claiming the Fifth on live TV, under the lights, and in public.

I understand that the committee has interviewed almost 300 people and they want to line up their ducks and all of that.  The Watergate committee did staff interviews before they took testimony in public, too.  But three months after they were authorized by the Senate and hired staff and began their investigation, they were holding hearings and we were witness to all the lies and contradictions and crimes that took place because Richard Nixon tried to cheat in his campaign for re-election.

The way Donald Trump and his people tried to steal the last election by attempting to stop the certification of the Electoral College ballots was in public.  We should already be watching their testimony in public.  We can wait for the committee’s final report – the Watergate committee didn’t produce its report for a year – but we can’t wait to discover the truth about how our democracy was almost overthrown on Jan. 6.