These hearings can't afford a slow boil.
that the justice system had convicted “only the seven persons accused of burglarizing and wiretapping the Democratic National Committee headquarters.” These hearings, he said, “are not designed to intensify or reiterate unfounded accusations” about higher officeholders “or to poison further the political climate of our nation.” The purpose “is not prosecutorial or judicial, but rather investigative and informative.
Things got a bit more interesting on Day 2, when James McCord, one of the burglars, testified that he thought Attorney General John Mitchell had approved the operation and that Howard Hunt, a CIA veteran who worked for Nixon, had advised him to plead guilty and wait for a pardon. Over the next two days, other White House aides, most of them midlevel, were drawn into the plot and the cover-up. Not until May 24, Day 5, did Ervin take a vote to extend the hearings into June and possibly longer.
And it was only the next session—on June 25, after an 11-day break—that John Dean testified, and that’s when all hell broke loose. Dean was White House counsel. He had taken part in crimes, led the cover-up, and eventually served a short jail sentence.
The managers of the current hearings on the 2021 insurrection had no time to dawdle. They couldn’t assume a TV audience with the patience to let the story slowly unfold—especially since the story had occurred well over a year ago, had been publicly scrutinized many times, and Trump was long out of office. By contrast, the Watergate hearings took place while Nixon was still president, and a grand jury was probing the same crimes separately and in secret.
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