There is a nationwide audience for the revelations that keeping coming forth from the House Select Committee on January 6th, but the most important audience these hearings really have is Attorney General Merrick Garland (and all the people in the Department of Justice who have also been investigating the insurrection attempt). What will Garland do when the hearings conclude and (a few months later) when the committee's final report is publicly issued?

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Donald Trump, when he was president, was mocked in many ways. The most amusing of all, though, was the giant balloon someone created of Trump caricatured as a baby, in diapers, clutching a cell phone in one of his tiny hands.

Today's hearing in front of the House Select Committee on January 6th proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what most observant people had already realized: Donald Trump was indeed nothing but a big baby. He is a man-child whose mental age seems stuck somewhere between two years old and perhaps five. He throws tantrums. He throws his own food. He cares about nothing but satisfying his own warped urges. His biggest concern on January 6th was that the crowd size of his rally looked impressive on television. He continually harps on this, speaking just this week about his crowd that day as (of course) the biggest, hugest crowd ever to assemble. It's all about Donald Trump's ego, and it always has been.

This was revealed at today's hearing, in great detail.

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Rarely do I sit down and write a column just to proclaim my abject ignorance about a political subject, but today seems an appropriate day to do so -- to make a larger point about pundits everywhere: nobody knows this right now. Nobody. Don't believe them if they tell you they do, because we are truly in uncharted territory.

The Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade was always going to have an impact on the upcoming election. I've been saying that pretty much ever since they heard the case, months ago. It became patently obvious when the draft decision was leaked. But still it seemed to catch some by surprise. The real unanswerable questions here are: How much impact will it have on the election? And which party will benefit?

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[Program Note: Today, I simply couldn't bring myself to review the past week as usual here, so instead of the normal Friday Talking Points column all I have to offer is a rant. Hopefully by next week -- especially since there will be no House Select Committee hearings to watch -- this column will return to its normal format, but today I just couldn't. I had a few things to get off my chest, instead.]

Barack Obama created many memorable soundbites and campaign slogans, but one of the best-remembered is (as he phrased it in a tweet): "There are no red states or blue states, just the United States." This call for unity in politics was generally well-received, since it spoke to (as another former president once put it) "the better angels of our nature."

But what is becoming more and more obvious is how wrong Obama got this. His words sound blissfully naive, at this point. Because we are devolving further into the Divided States of America, seemingly with every passing day. Today's Supreme Court decision which overturned Roe v. Wade is merely another milestone on this grim journey.

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Today saw the final June hearing of the House Select Committee on January 6th. Next week, Congress scarpers off on one of their many two-week holiday breaks, ostensibly for the July 4th holiday, so we won't be getting another of these hearings until the week of July 11th, at the earliest. But the committee does indeed plan to hold more public hearings, although they continue to hold their cards very close to the vest on exactly how many such hearings will take place, as well as the subject of any of the upcoming hearings. Perhaps this is done to build tension and interest among the public, or perhaps it is just because they are now reportedly being flooded with new information and new testimony, all offered up since the beginning of the public hearings earlier this month.

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Donald Trump's Big Lie wasn't just a political ploy. Parts of it were criminal, because people (including Trump himself) didn't just theorize or promote the falsehood that the election had been somehow "stolen" from Trump, they acted on it. And -- the violence of January 6th aside -- some of those actions were indeed criminal. The most obvious was the fact that in seven states groups of Republicans took it upon themselves to proclaim themselves the rightful slate of electors to the Electoral College, and they tried to foist this fraudulent proclamation upon the rest of the country. That is election fraud, and every single participant in this scheme should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law -- if only to deter others from doing anything like it in the future.

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Today was the fourth in the series of June hearings televised by the House Select Committee, and it turned out to be one of the most effective yet. The emotional tension in the room started somber but built into outrage and fear at the end. The subject at hand today was Donald Trump and his henchmen attempting to interfere in the election process at the state level, the illegal scheme to create out of whole cloth fake slates of electors, and the impact all of this had upon the people who stood firmly for the United States Constitution and the rule of law.

While the first three witnesses -- all Republican state officials at the time -- outlined exactly what the president and his "legal team" were trying to strongarm them into doing, the final witness stood in for the thousands of elections officials across the country that in one way or another have had their lives impacted for the worse as a direct result of Trump's Big Lie. She (and the others) gave powerful testimony as to the personal toll it has taken upon her and her entire family.

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In the past, whenever I have used that title phrase, it has always been tongue-in-cheek -- as a hyperbolic metaphor, in other words. Other close cousins to it would be: "A GOP circular firing squad," or "Republicans eating their own." Neither of those was ever meant literally either, obviously. They were all merely used to dramatize intraparty GOP power struggles, or one Republican getting ostracized or worse by his or her own fellow party members. Such as Madison Cawthorn getting successfully primaried, or what the party has done and is doing (both in the House of Representatives and back home in Wyoming) to Liz Cheney.

Now, however, one Republican candidate's new campaign ad forces me to use the phrase in absolutely literal fashion, since Eric Greitens, running for a U.S. Senate seat in Missouri, posted an ad that takes Republican politics to a whole different -- and very ugly and dangerous -- level.

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We do realize that last week we semi-committed to publishing regular Friday Talking Points columns if there weren't any previous primetime Thursday-night hearings to cover from the House Select Committee on January 6th. However, there was one thing that came out of yesterday's hearing that is not getting nearly enough media or public attention, and we feel obligated to try to change this -- mostly because it is so important.

So we are not in fact going to provide a regular Friday Talking Points column. We will first spend a few paragraphs dealing with a few other bits of political news, and then the rest of this column will consist of an extended excerpt from a letter which was entered into the record during the committee hearing yesterday, a letter which deserves everyone's attention. Every American should read this letter in full, but since it is 12 pages long we will only be offering up the most sobering parts of it.

Today, coincidentally, is the 50th anniversary of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C. The Washington Post has been building up to this anniversary all week, for the obvious reason that the newspaper's big claim to glory rests on the fact that it was instrumental in taking down President Richard Nixon, due to his illegal activities surrounding the 1972 presidential election. It's an important historical marker to note, obviously. And more than just a little bit ironic, considering where we as a nation are today.

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After a last-minute scheduling change to postpone yesterday's hearing before the House Select Committee on January 6th, today we got what was supposed to be the fourth hearing -- a look into Mike Pence's role in the events, and the pressures that were brought to bear on him by Donald Trump and his henchmen.

The star witness of the day was Judge J. Michael Luttig, who is a well-respected conservative legal voice. Luttig, after all, was the person Mike Pence reached out to for definitive advice on the role of the vice president in presenting and counting the Electoral College votes. Pence, obviously, would never have sought out the advice of some liberal "woke" judge, instead he turned to the weightiest conservative legal mind he could think of: Judge Luttig. It is important to keep that in mind, when hearing what Luttig had to say today.

Luttig speaks very slowly and deliberately, which many lawyers (especially judges) tend to do in order to carefully weigh and consider each word before it is uttered. In Luttig's case, however, it is due to a stutter or stammer and is just the way he copes with the speech impediment. This fact wasn't immediately known when his testimony began, which led to some mean-spirited commentary on social media until the true facts of his condition were known.

Even with this challenge, Luttig absolutely stole the entire show today, with a statement he read at the end. But before we get there, let's run down what the rest of the hearing covered.

Public Hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol [Episode 3]

There were only two witnesses for the entire time today, Judge Luttig and Greg Jacob, who was Vice President Mike Pence's chief legal counsel at the time. This position allowed Jacob to either be present for or at the heart of all the discussions being held between the vice president, the president, and all the crackpot lawyers who were attempting to convince Pence to either break or just ignore the Constitution and the relevant law which outlines the process of electing a president (the "Electoral Count Act of 1887").

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