Jan 6 hearing: Trump gets a taste of his own medicine
“He lit the fuse that ultimately resulted in the violence,” declared the United States Capitol vice-chair Liz Cheney during Thursday’s primetime hearing in which the House select committee is investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S Capitol. The vice-chair left no doubt about what its members hoped to achieve over the next few months of televised sessions.
The committee is presenting the prosecution case against Donald Trump, who “summoned the mob, assembled the mob” in an “attempt to undermine the will of the people” who had collectively declined to re-elect him to the White House. The evidence against Trump has never been heard in an official context until now because the Republican-dominated Senate refused to put his second impeachment on trial.
The Jan 6th hearings are by no means the first prosecutorial hearings held by committees of lawmakers at Westminster or in Washington DC. A hundred years ago, congressional examination of the Tea Pot Dome corruption scandal forever posthumously tarnished the reputation of Warren G. Harding’s brief presidency.
Richard M. Nixon might not have resigned were it not been for the revelations forced by Senator Sam Ervin’s Watergate hearings. Here, complete with a cream pie in the face, who can forget Rupert Murdoch’s “most humble day” over phone hacking, Amber Rudd’s resignation for misleading the Home Affairs committee, or the ignorance of her brief repeatedly displayed by Nadine Dorries?
The power of committees has been massively enhanced by electronic broadcast media – radio, then television and now multiple digital platforms. Both politicians and journalists have had to adapt to changing technology. Today the infinite choices available to British or American viewers mean that even investigations which are vital to the health of society struggle to attract attention.
The January 6th Committee has retained James Goldston, a former president of ABC News, as an advisor. They plan a carefully constructed series of six to seven hearings, time-limited to a couple of hours for the convenience of TV networks. The opening and closing events will go out in the evening on primetime TV. The closing hearing is scheduled for this autumn, just before the mid-term congressional elections.
Broadcasting decisions taken by the various outlets reflect how much has changed since Watergate, as well as the fragmentation which has taken place in the media market. In 1973 the triopoly of major networks missed a trick. CBS, NBC and ABC opted to rotate rolling coverage between them. But PBS, the low-budget not-for-profit service, went wall-to-wall.
Three-quarters of Americans tuned into the hearings at some point. PBS anchors Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil, a Canadian-born BBC veteran, became established and respected national personalities, along with the commentator Bill Moyers, a former staffer to President Lyndon Johnson. From then on the PBS Newshour has occupied a place in the American news firmament equivalent to Channel Four News or Newsnight from UK Public Service Broadcasters.
Inevitably the Jan. 6th hearings have become a new battlefield in America’s culture wars. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS and MSNBC all carried the first hearing live. But Fox News Channel, the preferred viewing for many Republican sympathisers, did not.
FNC’s celebrity anchors trashed “The January 6th “Show Trial” while Tucker Carlson dismissed the investigation as “propaganda”. His show dropped commercial breaks in case viewers flipped away to see it for themselves. Sean Hannity, who exchanged phone messages with Trump around that time, denounced it as “the dullest, the most boring, there’s-absolutely-nothing-new, multi-hour Democratic fundraiser.”
Fox did carry the Jan 6th hearings on its Business Channel, which is watched routinely by a much smaller audience than FNC. After the video compilation of events was broadcast, Bret Baier, FNC’s main Washington-based anchor, commented: “It does bring up the thoughts and feelings of that day. It was heinous. It was dark.”
For all the media concentration on “Jan 6th“, commentators are already speculating that hearings will struggle to match the attention grabbed by the televised libel battle of the Hollywood stars Johnny Depp and Amber Heard. If they are to “cut through”, the carefully tutored Representatives seem well aware that they will need dramatic “moments” and new “killer facts”, which can then become snippets on social media – the new front in the information war.
The Watergate hearings succeeded almost by accident thanks to the homely but wily “country courthouse” style set by Chairman “Senator Sam”. He, and other members holding the hearings, became stars and the subject of marriage proposals. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were so intrigued that they went to a hearing in person.
There was a great deal of substance too. The hearings revealed for the first time that Nixon covertly recorded conversations. The “expletive deleted” White House tapes furnished much of the evidence against him. Insider turncoat John Dean provided further damning testimony. A succinct question from ranking Republican Howard Baker put Nixon on the spot about the burglary of Democratic Party offices during the 1972 Election campaign: “What did the President know and when did he know it?
The January 6th hearings have got off to a powerful start, packed with “so many bombshell scoops”, in the opinion of CNN correspondent Jake Tapper. The committee chair Representative Bennie Thompson, an African American Democrat from Mississippi, is laying out the case with simple deliberation. The committee is arguing that the assault on the capital was not a random, spontaneous uprising.
Instead after a meeting with advisors, including Rudy Giuliani and his former National Security advisor Michael Flynn, Trump tweeted to his twenty million-plus followers: “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild”.
The next day the extremist militias, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, started co-ordinating plans for the big event. The committee also showed that Trump knew he had lost the election fairly, it had not been stolen.
“I told the President it was bullshit,” former Attorney General William P Barr testified – without the expletives deleted. In newly released recorded evidence, the President’s daughter told that committee that she agreed with Barr. However, her husband Jared Kushner accused officials of threatening to resign over the insurrection of “whining”.
Trump reportedly said “maybe they have the right idea. Pence deserves it” when he heard the crowd chanting “Hang Mike Pence”. Caroline Edwards, a Capitol police officer injured during the attack, testified, “I was slipping in people’s blood. It was carnage. It was chaos.”
Perhaps most consequentially for the future, the Jan 6th hearings also provide a controversial platform for Liz Cheney, a senior House Republican from Wyoming and the daughter of George W. Bush’s vice president Dick Cheney. She has been ostracised and demoted from her offices in the party because of her consistent denunciation of Trump.
She has declared openly that the wants to be “the leader, one of the leaders in the fight to restore our party.” She has not ruled out a run for the presidency, though it is difficult to see how she could ever run on a Republican ticket unless the Jan 6th hearings help to prise off Trump’s grip on the Republican party.
Broadcast hearings have made staging dramas that entertain and sway the public as important as lawmaking. Liz Cheney and her committee are attempting to give Donald Trump, the TV personality who became president, a taste of his own medicine.