Video: Bombshell January 6 Hearings and Post-Roe America

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On Tuesday, a former aide to President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Cassidy Hutchinson, testified before the special House committee investigating the January 6 attack. She detailed the inaction by the president and Mark Meadows as the riot broke out at the Capitol. Steve, Jonah, Sarah, and David discussed their reactions to the committee’s surprise hearing. Plus: A conversation on a post-Roe America.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Jonah drinking alone in his room and coming out to yell at people. Steve leading a Spanish Wine tasting. David doing a three hour seminar on Aquaman. And Sarah will be leading book club no doubt.

    What more could we ask?

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  2. SamH

    I appreciate the posting on the site the day after. I guess from a logistical perspective, though, YouTube and it’s demand that you pay for the upgraded version to keep watching once you’re away from the app. Would be great to have just a pure audio file to listen to so you don’t have to stay on the page and can multitask on a phone..that may be too big of an ask but wanted to put it out there. Thanks!

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  3. Campbell

    Sarah - you regularly assert that the hearings would be more effective if they had both parties represented (pro and anti Trump/insurrection). I agree in theory, however, I think in this situation, the Jim Jordan caucus would simply seek to derail and cast doubt, not to actually ask substantive questions.

    Their goal would likely become to make the hearings unwatchable. The facts stand against them, so there is little they could do along the lines of real cross examination.

    If this were being held in a court of law, the two sides would be held to certain rules of decorum, and they would have to abide by legal mores, but congressional hearings are anything but models of decorum.

    Do you feel like folks like Jim Jordan could actually be part of a meaningful committee? How would you expect the hearings to function differently if true trump apologists were in the room? I think your expectation of a perfect picture of two sides presenting their case and the truth shining through is unlikely.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Xsearnold

      I found myself yelling mean things at Sarah when she brought this up - and I love her so much! But it was so frustrating to hear this nonsense without it being followed immediately by, "And who's fault is that?!!" This could have been an independent, bipartisan committee but the Senate Republicans killed it (thanks, Cocaine Mitch!). And, McCarthy purposely put forth his candidates for the committee knowing full well that Pelosi would reject them, giving him the political cover to act like a 2-year-old and take his "ball" and go home! It would be great to have "cross-examination" happen - too bad the Republicans sabotaged that chance in favor of just being able to snipe at the committee from the outside instead.

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  4. Avatar photo
    WKDawson

    One thing that is nice to see in the House Select Committee is to see Rs and Ds working together again and I really felt a deep sense of gratefulness at seeing Bennie Thompson actually graciously thanking people who, for the most part, where working for T**** and largely political opponents of most of what he believes. I sensed nothing perfunctory or mere procedural about his tone. Doesn't that count as a kind of miracle in a sense? Imagine any other time. ... ... ...

    At least for a fleeting moment, we are seeing what used to be our Congress and Senate and that there are people who still understand what a servant's heart means. It used to be that we didn't worry all that much about whether the leadership was R or D, we knew that the person who was put to the job would be competent and would faithfully fulfill the duties of the office. It seems to me, that it was when this all started to turn into something like a sports rally that things gradually got uglier. Yet politics is not sports, it should be about who seems the best fitting to serve. Maybe I was just young at the time, but it seemed like there was genuine debate, it was about real issues (not sound bytes), and we had to develop arguments in a persuasive manner.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Faraday

    Jonah, There are legs on stools.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Faraday

    Also: Sarah needs a better ISP.

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  7. Avatar photo
    Faraday

    Point 1: Love the hair fluff Sarah!
    Point 2: Hope you are in a place thats not "yours" as that tree behind you needs water badly... ;-)

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  8. Avatar photo
    WKDawson

    Sarah, you were the buzzkill this time. ;-) I was just starting to feel David's recent article might mean that T**** would finally meet his comeuppance, and you dashed it on the rocks. The man seems to have 10000 lives, 9991 more than a cat. Anyway, it isn't the first time to have to accept that real justice will only be mete out by our maker when we cross that great river.

    One thing notable is Vic Chair Liz Cheney asked (in effect) "did either man change that story" and "did both characters agree with that story". So, it is possible that the story she was told was made up, but both of them certainly conveyed and agreed with the story. I think that was very important for Hutchinson at least.

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  9. Mike Darnell

    From NPR:

    Hutchinson was told that exchange about that episode in the Beast by Antony Ornato, who was then deputy chief of staff to the president.

    And she said that, when she was told — she was told that when they returned to the White House, because, again, she was in the motorcade with the president throughout the day when he went to the speech when he came back to the White House from the speech.

    And she said that, when she was told that, Robert Engel was standing there in the room, again, that Secret Service — Secret Service agent with the president, and he did not refute anything that was said in that episode.

    This seems critical to me. Engel and Ornato must be compelled to testify under oath about this aspect of Hutchinson’s sworn testimony.

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  10. Avatar photo
    Xaveria

    I get David's point that Trump knowing about the potential for violence is an important piece of news legally. That would be of more importance to me if I had any faith that any of this will ever see a courtroom. I am open to being surprised (and God knows, after the last few years, I should expect surprise) but I don't see the politics of the time allowing it. That leaves this matter in the court of public opinion, and in that court, this isn't news at all.

    How can it be in doubt, in anyone's mind, that Trump knew that that crowd was armed? *Everyone* knew that crowd was armed. On Jan 5th, living in a garage apartment in Texas, *I* knew that that crowd was armed. Rod Dreher wrote a piece about it a week earlier, showing a a ton of Parler screenshots of people planning violence at that rally. There had been stabbings at smaller Washington rallies earlier that week.

    Are we supposed to believe that the President of the United States, who is briefed everyday by multiple intelligence agencies, the same agencies who seem to have an electronic bug implanted in Vladimir Putin's cervical cortex, didn't know as much as Rod Dreher did? We're supposed to believe that Trump, who obsessively follows any news relating to himself, didn't know that the Proud Boys had said *in public* that they understood the President's explicit order to "stand back and stand by" to have been rescinded, and that they were preparing for violence?

    I get it, you're lawyers, and you have to think about what will stand up in front of a jury. I would be struck from that jury with cause because I have already made up my mind, and I believe that anyone who has not done so has either been in a coma or is an imbecile. Anyone who still has personal doubts about Trump's state of mind on that day is *delusional.* It requires a break from reality.


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    1. Avatar photo
      WKDawson

      I completely agree. I'm even living halfway round the world and reacted like Judge Luttig's wife to the orange menace's response to the election results. (That was in the long Frontline interview with Judge Luttig.) The few staunch right wingers I had contact with were even talking a bit that way, though I don't know that they actually knew anything more than my own feelings of dread told me. [They're notably silent about that subject now, at least the ones I can still talk to.] Anyway, it seems like we felt a similar sense of malaise about everything after the 2020 election, though I really could not imagine that we would end up here.

      It all reminds me of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers of Karamazov.
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om6HcUUa8DI
      It's a long book, and this a snippet, but remarkably spot on. (I think it is pretty easy to change the outfits to modern evangelical ones and grasp that __nothing__ has really changed. Prosperity gospel anyone?)

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