If you have skipped the January 6 Committee hearings, either on principle or because you have other things to watch and do, you have not missed much.
In the hours before the first hearing on June 9, aides revealed to the Washington Post that there would be no “shocking revelations,” despite months of behind-closed-doors interviews with over 1,000 so-called witnesses.
The hearings have also been dull: it turns out that when you exclude the other side, the result is not only unfair, but boring.
Nevertheless, there have been several interesting things to have emerged from the show trial. Most of them have been about the committee itself, and the lengths to which it has abused the powers of Congress.
The point of the public hearings is to attack former President Donald Trump and make it harder for him to run again in 2024. It is a form of dreaded “election interference,” which Democrats decried when they falsely accused Trump of colluding with Russia.
Here are five takeaways:
1. Many close Trump aides, including family members, disagreed with him about the election and tried to dissuade him. One cannot trust any evidence cherry-picked from hours of depositions in which the other side has no right to cross-examine witnesses. Still, the testimony of former Trump aides, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, suggested few believed there was provable fraud on a scale great enough, in the time available, to justify overturning the 2020 election.
2. The committee has been forced to doctor the evidence to make its case. The committee did things that would, in a court of law, result in an immediate dismissal for prosecutorial misconduct. It played a deceptively edited video of the Capitol riot; it omitted evidence in which Trump told supporters to protest peacefully, or to go home; it omitted context from testimony when it contradicted what the committee is trying to prove. Such methods further discredit the whole charade.
3. The committee has shown no evidence linking Trump directly to the riot. Despite promising for months that they would show that Trump was responsible for the violence, or criminally liable in some way, the committee provided no such evidence. All they did was make the same broadly circumstantial case that Democrats made in the second impeachment trial last year: Trump said the election was stolen, he held a rally, some people did bad things: nothing new after 17 months.
4. Vice President Mike Pence held out against pressure to send some Electoral College votes back to state legislatures. The committee showed on Thursday that the former vice president resisted pressure, behind doors and in public, to reject the results of the Electoral College vote. It attempted to portray him as a kind of martyr. But while Pence has said repeatedly, and in public, that he did not agree with Trump about the election, he has not supported the impeachment or the committee itself.
5. Witness testimony backfired when Democrats’ past efforts to stop the certification of elections was noted. One key witness, a retired federal judge, was clearly opposed to Trump, declaring him a threat to democracy in 2024. But the same witness also called out the fact that Trump had been following the historical precedent set by Democrats — including Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), among other committee members — in trying to block previous elections when Republicans won.
It is unclear where the January 6 Committee hearings go from here. Its members publicly feuded this week over whether there would be any criminal referrals, of Trump or anyone else. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) — one of two handpicked anti-Trump Republicans on the committee — promised more hearings over several weeks.
But there have been no bombshells, and the public is more concerned about other things. The average gas price on January 6, 2021: $2.27. The average today: $5.00.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.