This is a “Bias Makes You Stupid” spectacular. It’s kind of sad, really. The Democrats, the NeverTrump Republicans and the disgraced news media hate Donald Trump so, so much that they have allowed confirmation bias and desperation make total fools of them all. Oh, the American who are dim, gullible, ignorant or just as warped by hate and bias won’t notice, but it’s still a tragic spectacle.
I’m not watching the hearings; sock drawer emergency, you know. I didn’t learn about 23-year-old, Cassidy Hutchinson, the aide to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, testifying before the single-minded, hyper-partisan “Get Trump” “commission” until I was snagged by the title of a column in Commentary by my old friend (acquaintance, really) John Podhoretz, its editor. The title was “Trump Is In Deep, Deep, Deep, Deep Trouble.” John—I love ya, man, but—is a true NeverTrumper, and he was positively giddy over what he saw as damning revelations from Cassidy under oath. “If what she has testified to, sworn under oath, is not countered or contradicted by Meadows or Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cippolone,” he wrote, “then there is a credible criminal case that Trump violated the law in ways not dealt with by the second impeachment, and from which he would not be shielded by executive privilege…she has reported directly on things that went on inside the White House and around the Oval Office on January 5 and January 6 that go beyond the merely circumstantial.”
I read John’ piece, and I couldn’t imagine what he thought was so explosive. Most of her testimony, as far as I can see, is hearsay. John informed his readers,”You’re going to hear people call this ‘hearsay.’ It is not hearsay. It is direct testimony of contemporaneous things said in Hutchinson’s earshot about events that were taking place while she was listening.”
John is a smart guy, but he isn’t a lawyer, and most of what Cassidy testified to is hearsay. It is hearsay whenever one person’s account of what a second person said is used to prove that what the second person said is true. It doesn’t matter if the speaker she is quoting was describing events “contemporaneous” ti when she was listening. It still doesn’t prove what she heard others say was true. For example, Podhoretz writes, “She reported Meadows saying of the chant to hang Vice President Mike Pence that Trump “doesn’t want to do anything,” and that “he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”
A. So what? and B. That doesn’t prove Trump felt or thought or even said anything of the kind, and isn’t evidence, except of what Meadows said he thought Trump thought. Maybe.