Former Speaker Newt Gingrich Calls January 6th House Hearings ‘a Show Trial in the Soviet Tradition’

WASHINGTON, DC, July 20 — If the House January 6th hearings were a Broadway play it would get lousy reviews and be called a “flop.” As Newt Gingrich described it in a recent opinion article published by the Epoch Times, it’s “a show trial in the Soviet tradition wherein the outcome was decided, and the spectacle was meant to educate the public on the authority’s version of truth.”

For sure, it’s getting attention, particularly in the leftist media. The polls show that, overall, a majority of Republicans, Democrats and Independents who have been tracking the progress of the hearings say they have not learned anything new, particularly among Republicans and Independents.

Gingrich cites a recent Gallup Poll that tested confidence in 16 groups, including Small Business, which ranked at the top of the list attaining an honorable 68% vote of approval and the U.S. Congress, which landed at the very bottom of the grading with a dismal 7% approval rating.   

The January 6th hearings amount to a “show trial,” as the former House Speaker stated, a term the dictionary meaning of which is, “a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice.” The proof, he says, is in the fact that “Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to allow Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to make his own appointments to the committee.” It violated “centuries of rules and tradition—which led to the Republican boycott.  Is it any wonder the American people have anger, hostility, and contempt for the Congress and the news media?”

The House January 6th investigating committee consists of nine members, including two Republicans, if you want to call them that. They are Representative Liz Cheney [R-WY] and Representative Adam Kinzinger [R-IL] and they were obviously chosen because they are both anti-Trump RINOs, Republicans in name only. The Democrats on the committee are Representatives Elaine Luria [D-VA], Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), Stephanie Murphy [D-FL], Adam B. Schiff [D-CA], Pete Aguilar [D-CA], Zoe Lofgren [D-CA] and Bennie Thompson [D-MS].  Talk about a stacked deck.

Gingrich calls out Pelosi and her Democratic henchmen in his OpEd for “colluding to keep more than 1,000 videotaped interviews and 25,000 documents secret from the public.”

And then there was the damning testimony of White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson. Her claim that, during the January 6th brou-ha-ha, President Trump went “berserk,” as some might put it, and while in his presidential limousine physically attacked his Secret Service detail in a deranged effort to join the supporters who were violently protesting the presidential election results. According to the New York Post account Hutchinson’s description of the incident claimed that “an ‘irate’ Trump grabbed the wheel of the SUV he was riding in and then lunged at Secret Service agent Robert ‘Bobby’ Engel when Engel told him that he could not join thousands of his fans who were marching to the Capitol.”

President Trump declared it was a “sick and fraudulent…fake story.” And, sure enough, “Both Bobby Engel, the lead agent, and the presidential limousine/SUV driver are prepared to testify under oath that neither man was assaulted and that Mr. Trump never lunged for the steering wheel,” according to a Twitter posting by NBC News White House reporter Peter Alexander.

Bottom line: it seems that the January 6th hearings may wind up having been an over-the-top, partisan publicity stunt on the part of “The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.” As the Brookings Institution points out, “Many Americans are following the January 6th committee’s hearings, but few minds are being changed, according to national surveys conducted since the hearings began…Although the American people see the events of January 6th as significant, they do not consider them to be as transformative as other significant events in recent decades.” 

The Brookings report on the hearings shows that “About 6 in 10 Americans say that they are following ‘news’ about the January 6th committee, but only one-third are closely following the committee hearings, and even fewer are watching them, even in part…Overall, the share of Americans paying attention to the committee has not budged since early April, but the share of Democrats has risen significantly while the share of Republicans has declined.”