January 6 Hearings – Deep Left Field

Even though today’s hearing of the January 6 House Select Committee wasn’t held in primetime, it still yielded some very big headlines, including a former White House aide confirming that Rudy Giuliani is a bit too fond of booze.

Here are some of the other highlights, courtesy of CNN:

During Monday’s hearing, (former Attorney General William) Barr dismantled specific Trump-backed claims about illegal “vote dumps” in Detroit, nationwide vote-rigging by Dominion with its election machines, and other conspiracy theories.
The committee made the argument that Trump was repeatedly told by his own top officials, including Barr and Stepien, that the myriad of fraud claims he was pushing were groundless and were certainly not evidence that the election was stolen.

Many have been wondering, however, if the hearings will prompt criminal prosecutions of Trump and others connected to him by the U.S. Department of Justice, and Attorney General Merrick Garland made it clear Monday that the committee does indeed have his attention as well as that of prosecutors at the Justice Department.

What Garland had to say was far from your typical boilerplate response, NPR reports:

“I’m watching and I will be watching all the hearings, although I may not be able to watch all of it live. But I’ll be sure that I’ll be watching all that. And I can assure you that the January 6 prosecutors are watching all the hearings as well,” Garland said at a press conference about a separate enforcement action.
Garland said he was not going to be able to give “my own personal responses to this kind of evidence that is coming out” of this month’s committee hearings, as he does not comment on pending investigations.

Garland: I can assure that the January 6th prosecutors are watching all the hearings pic.twitter.com/XWq815kdOP
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 13, 2022

Read into that whatever you will, but it’s certainly not what most AGs say when asked such a direct question about congressional hearings.

There have been plenty of questions about whether or not Garland will take a stand and let the DOJ go after Trump and his cronies. Though he has yet to tip his hand, what the attorney general said today offered a bit of insight into a man we rarely hear from and should at least reassure us that he is indeed paying close attention. And that’s a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

Former GOP congressman and current Truth Social CEO Devin Nunes got a lot more than he bargained for when he suggested on Fox News that the conservative network had “destroyed” MSNBC with its decision not to air any of the January 6 committee’s public hearing on Thursday evening.

Nunes was a guest Sunday on “Media Buzz,” and he immediately told host Howard Kurtz that the recent hearings were biased and worthless because there are no supporters of failed former president Donald Trump on the Jan. 6 committee.

Kurtz countered by asking:

“Does that mean the media shouldn’t cover it much? Does it mean they should dismiss videotaped deposition from the likes of Bill Barr, Jason Miller, Jared Kushner?”

Nunes then tried to suggest that ratings for the hearing were a bust:

“To put this in primetime, the numbers were way down. So I don’t understand how these big corporations — I know it was spread across some 20 different networks — when you compare Fox News which didn’t which did not air that live, it just destroyed CNN and MSNBC in the ratings, right?”

But Kurtz wasn’t about to let Nunes blatantly lie about the ratings, countering him by noting:

“Networks like MSNBC did very well covering this hearing. Obviously, it would appeal to the liberal viewers of that network.”

As a matter of fact, 20 million people watched Thursday’s broadcast of the hearings. Fox, on the other hand, only drew about 3 million viewers:

According to the New York Times, at least 20 million viewers tuned in to watch the hearings. Only 3 million opted for Fox, which deliberately avoided televising the historic event.
An audience of at least 20 million people watched the first prime-time hearing of the House Select Committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Thursday night, according to Nielsen.
ABC attracted the biggest audience, with 5.2 million viewers. NBC and CBS each had an audience of more than three million. MSNBC averaged more than four million, and CNN drew 2.7 million. (The 20 million figure did not yet include PBS, so the total audience was most likely a bit bigger.)

As usual, Nunes and the other pro-Trump Republicans would rather lie than face facts.