[ An explosive first hearing promised a string of revelations that
could match the last time Congress checked a presidential threat to
democracy. ]
[[link removed]]

JANUARY 6 HEARINGS MAY BE WATERGATE HEARINGS 2.0  
[[link removed]]


 

Walter Shapiro
June 10, 2022
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ An explosive first hearing promised a string of revelations that
could match the last time Congress checked a presidential threat to
democracy. _

,

 

Up to now, the 1973 Senate Watergate hearings have been rightly
invoked as the gold standard for congressional investigations. But
despite the historical prominence those hearings have gained as the
decades have passed, Congress’s Watergate efforts started out as a
sleepy affair. The early hearings proceeded at the leisurely pace of
the afternoon soap operas that they preempted on the broadcast
networks. After the first day of the hearings in May 1973, Jules
Witcover began his Page 1 _Washington Post
[[link removed]] _story
by noting wryly, “If you like to watch grass grow, you would have
loved the opening of the Senate select committee’s hearing on …
Watergate.”

No one could write the same review for Thursday night’s kickoff of
the January 6 select committee. Never in the television age has an
entire congressional committee been so united in going for the jugular
of a former president. And the cohesive, riveting story it’s
promised to tell over the course of the next month might just be
enough to break the stalemate that has prevented the country from
universally recognizing the horrors that took place when a band of
insurrections stormed the Capitol.

The opening session
[[link removed]] of
the January 6 committee outlined a powerful prosecutor’s brief
against Donald Trump. As Representative Liz Cheney—ostracized by the
Republican Party and in the fight of her life
[[link removed]] to
hold her Wyoming House seat—summarized the essence of the case,
“You will hear how President Trump summoned a violent mob and
directed them to illegally march on the United States Capitol.”

The hearing was cleverly punctuated with clips from leading Trump
figures who testified during the committee’s closed-door
investigative sessions and said openly that Trump’s obsessive lies
about the outcome of the 2020 election had no basis in fact. Former
Attorney General William Barr recalled that he told Trump that charges
of a stolen election were “bullshit.” Ivanka Trump (yes, the
president’s fawned-over daughter) testified in a pained voice, “I
respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”

It had become fashionable ahead of the hearing to dismiss the January
6 committee as an exercise in futility, an empty show to appease those
who cheered Trump’s impeachment but one that cannot break through
the fog of partisanship. The Thursday print edition of _The_ _New
York Times _included
[[link removed]] a
column (“The January 6 Committee Has Already Blown It”) and
guest essay
[[link removed]] (“The
Anticlimax of the Jan. 6 Hearings”) preaching the doctrine of
hopelessness.

But judging from the initial two-hour session, those predictions could
prove misguided. For one, it certainly had a broader array of viewers
than just those who follow the news through the silos of cable
channels, since the full hearing was broadcast on the three major
networks. It was telling that the commentary on ABC News
[[link removed]] had none of the
standard equivocation that defines most television news. Instead, the
ABC correspondents and commentators took the testimony seriously
without bursting in with a contrary view from a Trump toady. Even
Chris Christie, the token Republican talking head, said, “I think
the most important thing for the long-term credibility of telling the
story tonight was using the words of the people around the
president.” And while the die-hard Trumpists are unlikely to be
swayed, there is a larger majority still waiting for a reckoning. In a
mid-May CBS News poll, 70 percent of Americans said
[[link removed]] that
they consider it “important” to “find out what happened” on
January 6.

The successful launch of the hearings came about in part thanks to GOP
obstructionism. First, Senate Republicans rejected a bill that would
have formed a bipartisan commission. When Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided
that the House would forge ahead solo, House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy named bomb-throwers such as Ohio’s jacketless Jim Jordan as
Republican members of the committee. When Pelosi decided to block
Jordan and Jim Banks from serving, as is the prerogative of the
speaker, McCarthy rescinded
[[link removed]] the
other three GOP members out of pique last summer.

The committee is still bipartisan, with Cheney and Representative Adam
Kinzinger on board. But these two Republicans remain the antithesis of
the cult of Trump. The result: the first congressional committee in
memory on which all nine members are united in the same
cause—getting at the truth of the attempted coup of January 6. That
meant the narrative was not interrupted by Benghazi-style
grandstanding and conspiracy-mongering by scorched-earth Republicans.

That ability to work in lockstep proved decisive for Watergate,
offering the most stunning unanticipated revelation in the past 50
years. Former Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield was testifying in a
methodical, unemotional voice when Fred Thompson, the minority counsel
who later became a Tennessee senator, asked a simple question, “Mr.
Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening
devices in the White House?” (The moment comes
[[link removed]] at
minute 57:00.) After a momentary pause, Butterfield acknowledged that,
yes, he was very much aware since he supervised their installation.
Even though the Watergate committee had known about Butterfield’s
bombshell for three days, there were no leaks, no hints of what was to
come.

While more than 80 percent of Americans said that they watched at
least part of the Watergate hearings, the transformation of public
opinion about Richard Nixon was gradual rather than immediate. In
mid-August 1973—after former Nixon aides, including John Dean, H.R.
Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman, had already testified
[[link removed]]—only
52 percent of Americans in a Gallup Poll thought that the hearings
were a “good thing” for America. But the revelation of tapes
changed that. Without the White House tapes—which Nixon at times
wanted burned
[[link removed]]—the
president probably would have survived to finish out his second term.
As Nixon put it in his memoirs, “I had believed that the existence
of the White House taping system would never be revealed.”

There have been some early leaks from the January 6 committee, but
there were also strong hints during Cheney’s overview that it has
its own set of revelations that may match the Butterfield shocker. As
Cheney indicated, we will hear firsthand accounts of Trump responding
to chants of “Hang Mike Pence” by callously saying, “Maybe our
supporters have the right idea.” Cheney claimed that Representative
Scott Perry had sought a preemptive pardon after he tried to help
Trump purge the Justice Department of people unwilling to follow the
Big Lie—and teased that there were other GOP House members yet to be
revealed who also wanted last-minute pardons before Trump left the
White House.

Already, Thursday night’s hearing underscored the finding that the
storming of the Capitol was orchestrated by far-right groups—the
Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, in particular—rather than being a
spontaneous bout of mob madness. Watergate fans who remember Bob
Woodward having a whispered conversation with Deep Throat in a dark
parking garage in the film version of _All the President’s
Men_ would have had a jolt of recognition when Nick Quested, a
British filmmaker who served as one of the two witnesses on Thursday,
testified that the leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers met
in a Washington parking garage on the night before the January 6,
2021, assault on the Capitol.

The Watergate hearings—which helped bring down a president—ran for
237 hours on daytime network television. The January 6 committee is
ditching the prime-time hours next week for daytime hearings that will
diminish the audience, though there is the hope that cable networks or
PBS might run evening replays. And predictions are risky after just
two hours of videos and testimony. But Thursday night’s riveting and
focused session raised hopes that these hearings might, just might, be
the second time in U.S. history that Congress brings down a dangerous
presidential threat to democracy.

_Walter Shapiro is a staff writer at The New
Republic. @MrWalterShapiro [[link removed]]_

_Want more politics, health care, and media updates? Sign up for
TNR’s The Soapbox weekly newsletter.
[[link removed]]_

 

* January 6 committee
[[link removed]]
* Insurrection in Washington DC
[[link removed]]
* Watergate
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Richard Nixon
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]