January 6 Committee Takes Sledgehammer to the “Big Lie” - Horowitz

January 6 Committee Takes Sledgehammer to the “Big Lie” - Horowitz

 

With two hearings now completed, the House Select Committee on January 6 is delivering compelling and consequential information packaged expertly for television, driving home to the more casually interested members of the public who are not already dug-in the far-reaching, reckless and dangerous attempt by President Trump to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, overturn the election results, and cling to power.

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The predictable talking points of Trump defenders and some Republican members of Congress that this is all yesterday’s news, much ado about very little and there are more important things to be worried about ring especially hollow given that Donald Trump is still spending every day advancing the “Big Lie” and weaponizing it in Republican primaries. Republican candidates around the nation are currying his favor by echoing him and making it an issue in the 2022 elections.  Even more disturbing, Trump allies are running for secretary of state and other local election administration positions where if successful they will be in a position to make mischief in the 2024 elections and beyond, and some states are passing laws that would make it easier for these partisans to overturn election results.  In other words, the threat to our democracy is not just something our children will study in history classes; it is present and ongoing.

The 20 million people who tuned in to this past Thursday night’s hearing on television and mainly stayed with the broadcast until the end as well as the additional 7 million or so who viewed it online, saw a powerful introduction to these high stakes.  Through the smart use of what James Poniewozik, television critic for The New York Times, accurately described as the techniques of true crime shows, the committee previewed what it termed as President Trump’s 7-part plan to overturn the election results, the details of which will be spelled out over the course of the hearings  Featuring new video of the violence on January 6  and the compelling testimony of Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was badly injured that day, the prime time hearing packed a strong emotional punch.

Most importantly, beginning Thursday night and detailed with a vengeance in yesterday’s morning hearing, the committee is taking a sledgehammer to the “Big Lie.” Video clips of testimony from members of the Trump administration and campaign, including Attorney General William Barr, campaign manager Bill Stepien, and various members of the White House office of legal counsel, were used to communicate in granular detail that Donald Trump was told in real-time that all his charges of voter fraud had been investigated by his own Justice Department and were baseless.  Yet the committee provided a timeline with an accompanying video on how time and again Trump continued to make the charges even after his own team had debunked them.  Referring to Trump’s lack of interest in getting to the bottom of the various charges to discern their accuracy, the former attorney general telling remarked, “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”  

In the voices of key members of Trump’s own team—which provided a high level of credibility--the hearings have driven home that not only was there no evidence of fraud anywhere near the scale that would have been needed to overturn the election results, but that Donald Trump knew it and recklessly advanced the “Big Lie,” anyway. He continued to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election process and proceeded with his unprecedented effort to cling to power, indifferent to how much wreckage he left in his wake  As The Wall Street Journal editorialized over the weekend,  "Mr. Trump betrayed his supporters by conning them on Jan. 6, and he is still doing it."

The committee made another politically smart choice in selecting Chris Stirewalt, a former member of the Fox News Election Decision Desk and on-air political analyst for the conservative network to give live testimony yesterday.  Prompted by Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren’s (D-CA) questions, Stirewalt cogently explained why Fox called Arizona for Biden before the other networks and why it was completely predictable that Trump was ahead early in the evening when only machine votes were counted, and that Biden pulled ahead once the mail ballot totals came in.  Fox News, of course, has more credibility with Republicans and Conservatives--- a majority of which before these hearings began believed that it is likely the election was stolen-- than the other major news networks.

It is too soon to tell what the total impact of the hearings will be in a polarized nation where too many of us live in our own ideological echo chambers. Anyone without a religious belief in the ‘Big Lie,” however, who watched the first two hearings is likely to be persuaded of its falsehood   

Drawing on the hard work of its’ staff investigators in generating compelling testimony by people close to Trump and through employing state-of-the-art television story-telling techniques, the committee is off to a great start in educating the American people about the events leading up to January 6, the day itself, and the threat to our democracy that still must be confronted.  This, after all, is Job. #1.