Even a 'Trump hater' agrees the Jan 6 committee is going to 'backfire'. The article below by Gary Abernathy says the committee's 'objective is misguided', attempt to be 'persuasive vs investigative', questions & answers are 'carefully scripted' and offers 'no defense questioning' of the witnesses or the supposed evidence presented. A surprisingly good summary from a Trump hater, and in, of all places, The Washington Post.

by Gary Abernathy,

... the one-sided and sloppy procedures too often employed by the Jan. 6 House committee are providing more fodder for Trump’s stubborn partisans.

Never have we seen such a scripted production masquerading as a congressional hearing. Narration and questions are carefully read from a teleprompter. The witnesses even appear to have been coached to pause at specific points to await the next prepackaged query. While chair Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) do the heavy lifting, other committee members sit in zombie-like silence, unless it’s a day designated for one of them to perform, too.

This week’s hastily presented hearing featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, would have benefited immensely from some cynical inquiry. The nation was presented a gossipy mess of “here’s stuff I heard that Trump did,” some of which was immediately refuted. Yes, Hutchinson was under oath and others weren’t, but even under oath, there is little jeopardy attached to merely recounting what others told you, even if it turns out to be wrong.

... as George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley tweeted: “It is the type of problem that arises when the focus of a hearing is persuasive rather than investigative. The account fit the narrative and the underlying fact seemed simply too good to check.”

The committee is anxious to prove that Trump knew the election wasn’t fraudulent and yet engaged in numerous unsavory tactics to engineer and encourage an attack on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Biden’s certification as president. It’s a misguided objective, and will likely never produce evidence that will be trial-worthy. It ... remains highly unlikely that Trump was involved in actually planning the attack on the Capitol.

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