Newt Gringrich on Liz Cheney and the Jan 6th committee. he's not impressed, he's horrified.
That will leave a mark.
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Liz Cheney and the committee's ongoing process of dishonesty, violating attorney-client privilege, and leaking to friendly leftwing media was a total perversion of the congressional system. It was a dishonest effort to destroy innocent people of integrity with one-sided lies and smears.
Fortunately, Chairman Barry Loudermilk, who leads the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight (on which I served for over a decade), has doggedly looked into the Jan. 6 Committee's lies and manipulations. In the coming months, we will be shocked at the stunning dishonesty Chairman Loudermilk will reveal.
Passantino represented several witnesses before the Jan. 6 Committee with no problems. He represented Cassidy Hutchinson with precisely the same integrity. In fact, he represented Hutchinson through multiple interviews covering about 20 hours.
Hutchinson was a desirable witness for the Committee, because she entered the White House in her early 20s and became Special Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Legislative Affairs. She reported to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and had an office in the West Wing just a few feet from the Oval Office.
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Liz Cheney apparently decided Hutchinson would make a star witness if only she would say the right things.
In an amazingly inappropriate and unethical move, Liz Cheney herself (along with a small number of senior staff) approached Hutchinson after her second committee interview without informing her [attorney] Passantino. Liz Cheney then called Cassidy in for a third interview, with Passantino again serving as counsel, with neither Cassidy nor Cheney ever informing Passantino that they had been speaking without his knowledge.
Contacting Hutchinson without informing Passantino was clearly unethical, and it appears as if Liz Cheney instructed Cassidy not to tell Passantino they had spoken. This was a profound breach of legal ethics. Liz Cheney knew this well. She earned her law degree from the University of Chicago.
As a senior member of Congress (and the national media's anointed hero), Liz Cheney approached and sought to manipulate an isolated, frightened woman in her mid-20s. Does that sound appropriate? I suspect Liz Cheney knew she was doing something wrong because she apparently did not tell her fellow committee members.
After being manipulated by Cheney, Hutchinson dismissed Passantino and hired a new lawyer who was eager to cooperate with the committee. Suddenly, Hutchinson's testimony started changing. As Chairman Loudermilk has said:
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The Jan. 6 Committee did everything it could to avoid being reviewed. It has not released transcripts of many interviews. It claims to have destroyed some videos of interviews. In one deliberately opaque move, the committee seems to have sent some of its documents to various other agencies, making them difficult to gather.
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The Republican House has since brought the Jan. 6 Committee materials back from the National Archives, and they are being studied by the Committee on House Administration. Some surprisingly bad examples of rule-breaking and simply lying to the American people are beginning to emerge.
Passantino's courage in bringing his lawsuit will accelerate the process of learning just how bad the Jan. 6 Committee was and reveal the depth of its most aggressive members' dishonesty and manipulation.
History will not grant Liz Cheney or the Jan. 6 Committee members the profile in courage they wanted. It will record a profile in deception, distortion, and vengeance.
That will leave a mark.
