The Jan. 6 commission hearings have a lot in common with scripted TV miniseries: narrative, montage — even surprising revelations, such as when the commission kicked off a bonus episode, featuring Cassidy Hutchinson, an assistant to Mark Meadows, the former chief of the White. House of staff, with one day’s notice.
One thing the hearings don’t have, though, are episode titles. But if they did, it would be hard to call this breathtaking episode “The Beast.”
As White House viewers know, “The Beast” is a nickname for the presidential vehicle. It also evokes the chaos Ms Hutchinson described in the vehicle when the attack began. Ms. Hutchinson shared a story saying she was told by a member of President Donald J. Trump’s security agency, saying that Mr. Trump grabbed the wheel after being told he could not join the crowd at the Capitol and fell at the throat of his own Secret Service agent. (Secret Service officials later denied that Mr. Trump assaulted an agent or reached for the wheel, but did not deny that he wanted to go to the Capitol.)
For an afternoon, the investigation played out like the Watergate hearings as they were slapped by the “24” writers’ room.
The session started with built-in tension; just holding it was a risk. By mysteriously announcing it with almost no prior details, such as a surprise drop on Netflix, the committee opened itself up to being panned if the hearing was below par.
It didn’t. In a stunning two-hour testimony, Ms. Hutchinson, poised and measured at just age 26, described January 6 and the days before at the White House, in a series of scenes and quotes so vivid that they could almost instantly be turned into an HBO docudrama.
There was the Trump booster and attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, days before the Capitol attack, who asked, “Aren’t you excited for the 6th?” There was an enraged Mr. Trump who threw plates from the White House and left Mrs. Hutchinson to wipe ketchup off a wall.
More serious, Mr Trump demanded that magnetic detectors be removed to allow armed supporters into his Jan. 6 meeting (“They are not here to hurt me”). And there was a chilling exchange when Mr. Meadows — repeatedly described as staring impassively at his phone — answered attorney Pat Cipollone, who insisted that Mr. Trump defend the Capitol: “He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat.”
Mrs. Hutchinson was not such a bold name in Washington as some preconceived notions speculated. (Mike Pence? Ginni Thomas?) She didn’t have the professional stature of previous guests like former judge J. Michael Luttig; her testimony lacked the emotion of Wandrea Moss, the Georgia election officer who spoke of harassment and racial abuse for doing her job. (It was only towards 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 well-known figure in intrigue stories: the upbeat, underrated subordinate who’s seen and heard things, and kept notes on the sidelines. (Mr. Trump, responding to his online outlet Truth Social, complained that “I hardly know who this person, Cassidy Hutchinson, is.”)
Her testimony was the aural equivalent of a bottle episode — the episode deep in the run of a series that breaks form to focus on a single character or incident. Indeed, at the start of the session, the committee’s vice chair, Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, noted that while the previous hearings have focused on various aspects of the effort to reverse the 2020 election, this hearing differed of those wires together.
That kind of narrative clarity is one of the reasons the hearings have made for such a well-done television. Another example is their attention to content and style, combining their prosecution case with an awareness of what piques viewers’ curiosity and then keeps people talking. (The committee has offered “earlier” summaries and teased future attractions, such as the fragmentary revelations of politicians seeking presidential pardons.)
Key Revelations from the January 6 Hearings
Tuesday’s testimonial was a triumph of style and substance in miniature. It was full of watercooler bait, like the footage of the 45th President of the United States, an angry real-life housewife, knocking over a White House tablecloth and turning into a beast 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 mockumentary-dry title card “1 Minute 36 Seconds Later” to Michael T. Flynn. , mr. Trump’s former national security adviser was asked whether the Jan. 6 violence was justified. (He took the fifth.)
But all of this was in the service of a larger and very serious line: The argument that the January 6 attack was far from a spontaneous outburst of anger was the bloody culmination of any attempt at democratic elections that could have succeeded (and would can be repeated more successfully in the future).
Ms. Hutchinson’s part of the story was, on the one hand, a mind-boggling behind-the-scenes story. On the other hand, it was a standalone one-episode story of Mr Trump desperate to stay in power, essentially trying to lead an armed private militia into Congress.
Barring further surprises, the committee is now taking a mid-season break until after the July 4 holiday. It has left its viewers quite a story to chew on during the intermission. The price of success, of course, raises the bar, and it remains to be seen whether the final run of the hearings can pay off the build-up, or whether it can lead to actual political or legal action.
But this episode? It was a beast.
