The committee’s January 6 hearings have a lot to do with the scripted TV mini-series: storytelling, editing – even a surprise revealing, as when the committee released a bonus episode featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, Mark Meadows’ aide, former White House chief of staff, with a one-day notice.
One thing the hearings don’t have, though, is the titles of the episodes. But if they did, it would be hard to resist calling this amazing part The Beast.
As White House observers know, the Beast is a nickname for the presidential car. It also caused the chaos that Ms. Hutchinson described in the vehicle when the attack began. Telling a story she said was told by a member of President Donald J.’s bodyguard. Trump, Ms. Hutchinson said Mr. Trump took the wheel after being told he could not join the Capitol crowd and threw himself into the throat of his own secret service agent. (Later, Secret Service officials denied that Mr. Trump attacked an agent or reached for the steering wheel, but did not deny that he wanted to go to the Capitol.)
For one afternoon, the investigation played like Watergate’s hearings, broken out of the 24 writers’ room.
The session began with built-in voltage; simple detention was a risk. Announcing it mysteriously with almost no preliminary details, such as a surprise drop on Netflix, the commission opened up to consider if the hearing did not take place.
Did not happen. In a stunning two-hour testimony, Ms. Hutchinson, calm and measured at just 26, described January 6 and the days that led to it in the White House, in a series of scenes and quotes so vivid that they can be transcribed almost directly into an HBO documentary drama.
There was Trump’s aide and attorney Rudolf W. Giuliani, days before the Capitol attack, who asked, “Aren’t you worried about the 6th?” There was a furious Mr. Trump throwing plates at the White House, leaving Mrs. Hutchinson to wipe ketchup from the wall.
More seriously, Mr. Trump insisted that magnetic detectors be removed to allow armed supporters to participate in his January 6 rally (“They are not here to hurt me”). And there was a chilling exchange when Mr. Meadows – repeatedly described as looking impassively on his phone – replied to attorney Pat Chipolone, who urged Mr. Trump to defend the Capitol: “He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat.”
Mrs. Hutchinson was not as big a name for Washington as some preconceived notions suggested. (Mike Pence? Ginny Thomas?) She didn’t have the professional growth of earlier guests like former Judge J. Michael Lutig; her testimony lacked the emotion of Vandrea Moss, a Georgia election worker who described harassment and racist violence for doing her job. (It wasn’t until the end that Ms. Hutchinson described her feelings about Mr. Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6: “As an American, I was disgusted.”)
But she was a familiar figure in the intrigue stories: the underrated underrated subordinate who saw and heard certain things and took notes from the sidelines. (Mr. Trump, responding in his online edition of Truth Social, complained that “I hardly know who this man is, Cassidy Hutchinson.”)
Her testimony was the equivalent of listening to an episode with a bottle – the episode deep in the series that breaks the form to focus on a character or incident. In fact, at the beginning of the session, Commission Vice-Chair Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, noted that while previous hearings focused on various aspects of efforts to cancel the 2020 election, it would bring together several of these topics. .
This kind of narrative clarity is one of the reasons the hearings were made for such well-executed television. Their attention to the essence and style is different, combining their prosecutorial case with the awareness of what arouses the curiosity of the viewers and makes people talk afterwards. (The committee has proposed summaries of “earlier” and irritated upcoming attractions, such as the revelations of politicians who asked for the president’s pardon.)
Key revelations from the January 6 hearings
Tuesday’s testimony was a triumph of style and content in miniature. It was full of water-cooled bait, like the images of the 45th President of the United States turning over a White House blanket like an angry True Housewife and moving in beast mode in his own limousine.
It was also visually conscious for a congressional hearing, from the White House floor plan showing how close Ms. Hutchinson was to the executive action, to the mock-up title card “1 Minute 36 Seconds Later” after Michael T. Flynn , Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser was asked if the Jan. 6 violence was justified. (He took the heel.)
But all of this served a larger and deeply serious line: The argument that the January 6 attack was far from a spontaneous outburst of rage was the bloody peak of an attempt to drive out democratic elections that could (and could) to be repeated, more successfully, in the future).
Part of Mrs. Hutchinson’s story was, on the one hand, a startling story behind the scenes. On the other hand, it was a stand-alone story from an episode about Mr. Trump desperate to stay in power, essentially trying to lead an armed private militia into Congress.
With the exception of additional surprises, the commission is now taking a break in the middle of the season until the July 4 holiday. He left his viewers a lot of history to chew on during the break. The price of success, of course, raises the bar, and it remains to be seen whether the final conduct of the hearings can pay off the buildup, or whether it can provoke real political or legal action.
But this installment? He was a beast.
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