How Liz Cheney put the ‘show’ in show trial

Although she played a backstage role in the J6 show trial staged to destroy Donald Trump, former Rep. Liz Cheney may find herself in the starring role of her very own, very real trial.

In a report released Tuesday, Rep. Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., the chairman of the House Subcommittee on Oversight, “outlines criminal recommendations” for the former vice president’s daughter.

As Loudermilk makes clear, Cheney ran the show at the January 6 Select Committee. Democrat Rep. Benny Thompson may have been the nominal chairman, but nominal Republican Cheney assumed the improvised role of vice chairman and pulled all the relevant strings.

That string pulling culminated in the most spectacular Deep State show trial since Watergate. Its goal was not to seek the truth but, says Loudermilk, to showcase the “false, pre-determined narrative that President Trump was personally responsible for the breach of the Capitol on January 6.”

Not content with humiliating Trump behind closed doors or on daytime TV, Cheney and her crew recruited veteran TV executive James Goldston.

His job, wrote the New York Times approvingly, was “to produce the hearings as if they were a docudrama or a must-watch mini-series.”

In 2020, Goldston served as president of ABC News. Under his guidance, on an almost nightly basis that spring and summer, his producers used their editing tricks to convert violent riots into largely peaceful protests.

Using those same tricks for the House Select Committee, his producers managed to turn a largely peaceful protest into an insurrection and Trump into the insurrection’s leader.

For his efforts, Goldston, a British native, got the best reviews of his career. “They did it. They pulled it off,” said his hometown Guardian. “Anyone who feared that the January 6 committee’s season finale would turn into an anti-climax – more ‘Game of Thrones’ than ‘M*A*S*H’ – need not have worried. There were shocks, horrors and even laughs.”

Those paying attention, especially those concerned with the trafficking of children, had reason to distrust Goldston even before he put the “show” in show trial.

In 2019, Goldston made news, at least on the right, for spiking a 2015 interview ABC’s Amy Robach had done with Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a Jeffrey Epstein victim. In 2019, an ABC insider leaked a hot-mic moment in which Robach complained about the burial of this story.

In the 2015 interview, Giuffre claimed that at 17 she had been forced to have sex with Prince Andrew. She also claimed to have seen Bill Clinton on Epstein’s island.

Had ABC aired the interview, Epstein’s predatory ways may well have ended four years and countless victims sooner. Fortunately for Epstein, Goldston was a friend of both the Clintons and the Royal Family. The Deep State takes care of its own.

The Goldston miniseries further inflamed would-be jurors, not that they needed inflaming. For the J6ers, from day one, proceedings in the D.C. courts had been all show and no justice.

“IMPOSSIBLE to get a fair trial in Washington, D.C., which is over 95% anti-Trump, & for which I have called for a Federal TAKEOVER in order to bring our Capital back to Greatness,” Trump posted on Truth Social in August 2023.

Trump was not exaggerating. In 2016, Hillary Clinton won more than 95% of the district’s two-party votes. Of the 50 states, by contrast, none gave Trump less than 30% of the vote.

Given the unlikeliness of success in the D.C. courts, Trump’s DOJ might want to hire a producer and content itself with a show of its own.

Co-starring in “All About Liz,” in the role of the ambitious ingenue, would be the “star witness” of the Goldston production, Cassidy Hutchinson.

Just 24 years-old on January 6, Hutchinson had more title – “Special Assistant to the President and Coordinator for Legislative Affairs for White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows” – than she did common sense.

It was Hutchinson who changed her testimony for no better reason, it seems, than to add punch to Goldston’s production.

In her revised testimony, Hutchinson famously claimed that President Trump tried to seize the steering wheel of “the beast” from the driver’s control and, when thwarted, lunged toward the neck of the other Secret Service agent in the vehicle.

This was all second and third-hand nonsense, easily refuted by the actual participants. The story also undermines a central finding of the select committee, namely that Trump refused to intervene in the riot.

The Capitol Police were already lobbing munitions into a peaceful crowd at the Capitol when Trump allegedly tried to go there. Why would he have wanted to go to the Capitol if not to intervene?

Doctoring the timeline is the least of Cheney’s problems. Loudermilk accuses her of colluding with Hutchinson without her attorney’s knowledge and recommends investigating the fallen congresswoman for “potential criminal witness tampering.”

His evidence against Hutchinson for perjury is powerful. Once she rolls over on Cheney for suborning that perjury, who knows? Maybe even a D.C. court will give justice a chance.

Jack Cashill’s new book, “Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6,” is available in all formats.