Your typical congressional oversight hearings are hard enough to script and choreograph to engage an otherwise distracted audience. Infinitely more difficult is when it’s not just one hearing, but several over the course of a month, based on information collected over an entire year, from 1,000 witnesses and 140,000 documents. And it’s not just any old committee, but the January 6 Select Committee — with resources, yes, but with the clock running, unbridled, toward expiration.
In such a case, circumstances demand, without a doubt, “shock and awe” — you need to “blow the roof off the house.”
That’s what many were expecting, given the hype from some of the committee’s members. That’s not what the committee gave the country last night.
Instead, they delivered a sober, methodical narrative stringing together mostly previously reported dots and facts that were loosely attached to witness testimony and other means. We also got a steady dose of what we are going to hear in future hearings, as if they were indisputable facts.
While the hearing had numerous solid moments of effectiveness, it was not prime time-worthy.
My experience of orchestrating such oversight hearings — covering 19 years in the Senate — would have moved me in a different direction, though it’s easy for me now to carp from the sidelines. This hearing was basically a recap of what we know, sprinkled with a few new tidbits. It was a tease for what lies ahead in future hearings.
I would have scheduled this hearing for a daytime affair, with a soft sell, low-key approach as merely a table-setter: Here’s what we know to date, with the latest facts we have learned, including the audio and video footage, and here’s what’s coming down the pike. In subsequent hearings, including in prime time, we will supply the shock and awe, with hard documentation and witness testimony.
If I were Mr. Joe Normal living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, turning on the tube at 7 p.m. (CT) last night — having heard the roof of my house was going to blow off — I would have been disappointed, or — worse — I’d have switched to the Food Network halfway through, or sooner.
The hearing — slated for 90 minutes — took 110. (Not bad for a congressional oversight hearing.) But half of that time was spent on just two opening statements. Opening statements are not where you find facts and compelling testimony. They are used to frame the hearings. Vice Chair Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) statement was solid in that regard. It was probably solid enough to keep Mr. Normal from switching to Guy Fieri.
But then comes a rerun of riot footage — much of it brand new to be sure — that Mr. Normal can’t really differentiate from other such footage he has seen for the past year and a half. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards gave a gripping first-hand account of her traumatic ordeal at the hands of violent rioters, and the physical, emotional and mental consequences she has endured. Though Mr. Normal might have found her testimony to be most compelling, he recalls seeing similar testimony last July from four other Capitol Police officers with their own gripping, first-hand accounts.
Most of what we saw from the committee was not new. There were some new additions to the narrative, but some may need clarification.
For instance, former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s comments that Trump’s claims of election fraud were “bullshit” and “complete nonsense” were revealed by him in his recent book. What’s new is that, rather than reading it from the book, the audience got to see Barr saying it in a taped interview by the committee staff.
The staff also taped an interview with former Trump campaign aide Jason Miller, who was shown saying the campaign’s data expert told Trump in no uncertain terms, just after the election, that he was going to lose. Miller tweeted last night that the clip shown by the committee was missing context. That won’t be clarified unless and until the committee releases the full transcript.
The committee’s clip showing First Daughter Ivanka Trump’s testimony suggesting she deferred to Barr’s assessment of Trump’s voter fraud claims seemed compelling on the surface — but will she, too, claim that the clip is missing context? Again, we won’t know unless the transcript is released.
There are other examples. This just goes to show that, without live witness back-and-forth with the committee members, merely uttering these assertions in an opening statement is not definitive.
There were some notable high points. Most obvious was the absence of your typical House food fight and disruptions by bickerers. The committee managed to keep the hearing under two hours by allowing only two members to speak, eliminating opening statements from the two witnesses, and adhering to a tight script. The hearing did not suffer from credibility issues, so long as contextual challenges from some of the witnesses can be cleared up.
In coming hearings, given the hype we’ve heard from some members, the committee needs to deliver on the public’s expectations. The committee needs to marshal its evidence, in a credible way, so that viewers are left saying, “Wow, I didn’t realize it was that bad!” This would be so for all the major issues the committee is examining: the attempt to overturn the election; how perilously close we came to losing our democracy; how threatened our democracy still is.
The committee’s performance and effectiveness are under scrutiny. We won’t know what grade to assign it until the polls come in.
Watching closely will be historians and a small but substantial body of the undecided electorate… and maybe also, even Attorney General Merrick Garland. Accordingly, the committee needs to ratchet up its performance of opening night to reach expectations. Perhaps its next prime time event can yet be a blockbuster.
Kris Kolesnik is a 34-year veteran of federal government oversight. He spent 19 years as senior counselor and director of investigations for Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa). Kolesnik then became executive director of the National Whistleblower Center. Finally, he spent 10 years working with the Department of the Interior’s Office of Inspector General as the associate inspector general for external affairs.