The exception, maybe

With one possible exception, the House committee investigating the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, has executed its televised hearings with uncommonly effective tactical and strategic precision.

It’s unlike Democrats to accomplish such effectiveness. One is inclined to credit the focused competence of Republican Liz Cheney and the expertise of the former ABC “Nightline” producer who has been a consultant.

Telling the story methodically and credibly through smartly chosen and courageous Republican voices, using video images interspersed impeccably … let’s just say that the product has been, with that one brief possible exception, a template for the next time a lying ego-crazed president stages an attempted coup.

Also with one possible exception, and it’s the same one, the testimony Tuesday of Cassidy Hutchinson was profound and powerful.

She had been an early-20s headdown aide- de- camp to Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. But apparently she’d had her ears cocked while her head was down.

As women were saying Wednesday, possibly insightfully, the Republican white guys working around Hutchinson looked through her as if she wasn’t there, assuming she wouldn’t dare repeat anything either because she didn’t understand it or wouldn’t remember it or was just a loyal little lady thrilled to be in their manly proximity.

She heard things. She even seemed to understand them.

On Tuesday afternoon, at a special meeting of the committee on one-day notice, she, all of 26 now, in a soft and deliberate manner under oath in live living color, related those things.

What she shared served the two committee purposes. It revealed Trump, through behavioral anecdotes, as an even more dangerous madman than we knew.

Second, it advanced a prosecutable case that Trump knew and wasn’t bothered that some of the people who’d come to Washington to rally for him that morning were armed, yet he inspired them to go armed to the Capitol to fight, somehow, for his nonsensical assertion that he’d really won the presidency that Mike Pence was too gutless to hand to him. And it advanced the case that Trump then sat and watched the criminal invasion of the U.S. Capitol by his charges and ignored for hours both staff and family pleadings, including legal counsel, that he call down his scruffy soldiers either to try to save his legacy or keep himself out of jail.

This was an element of congressional testimony of more potentially damaging consequence to a president than any at least since Alexander Butterfield’s that Richard Nixon recorded all his conversations.

That brings us to the one possible exception, which is my personal assessment, not anyone else’s so far as I know.

Some of my partisan Democratic friends say it is no exception at all and that I fret too much about the silliest things. There even has been talk that I’m a Republican sympathizer who ought to admit as much if I’m going to seek to apply objective analysis rather than join their cheering rah-rah, go-team fanhood.

Then there is the view that there is a method to what I see as the committee’s blunder, and that all will be revealed. Of that, we will see.

I refer to the committee’s decision to ask Hutchinson under oath and on live television what she only heard a description of — not what she saw. It invited her to share a detailed playby-play account — secondhand — of a Trump so crazed in his desire to be taken to the Capitol that day — for what, exactly, we can’t know — that he lunged for the steering wheel of his presidential transport, and, when blocked in that maneuver, made some sort of choking move on the Secret Service agent.

Thus the committee produced a dramatic headline that it had to know would overpower more substantive testimony. And it invited criticism that it was so over-eager in its quest to humiliate Trump that it showcased a wild secondhand tale at risk of damaging pushback against the accuracy of Hutchinson’s as-told-to account.

Within hours, networks were reporting that the Secret Service was offering itself for responding testimony. Reporters were citing an anonymous source saying the affected firsthand parties were prepared to testify that Trump never reached for any steering wheel or made a choke-move on anybody.

Nobody is yet known to be denying that Trump was out of his head with fervor to go.

It feels like an unforced error by the previously error-free committee. Any intimation that Hutchinson lied or related inaccurate information conceivably could steal the deserved thunder of her full firsthand testimony.

On the other hand, there are those who speculate that those two firsthand sources were told under previous committee questioning of Hutchinson’s account and said nothing to counter it. It’s that they can now come forward under oath to tell why they said nothing then or perjure themselves now.

That sounds like the committee’s laying a trap. Wow, y’all, if so.

For the moment, though, subject to update, I score the committee making one over-eager tactical blunder, potentially costly.