Thread by @PalmerReport

Steve Bannon has gotten himself sent to prison.

Mark Meadows turned over evidence and has still gotten himself sent to prison.

Multiple people are pleading the fifth.

Mike Pence's chief of staff is fully cooperating.

So are others.

The 1/6 committee's strategy is working.

This is what winning in politics looks like. Every single Trump person has to decide whether to sell Trump out or go to prison. Plenty will sell Trump out. Plenty will go to prison. In every instance it's a win for America and a loss for Trump world.

In politics or any other arena, it's almost impossible to set things up so expertly that your opponents lose no matter what move they make. Yet the 1/6 committee has done precisely this. Of course it helped that Trump world did all this dumb criminal stuff to begin with.

What we're starting to see now is that the committee is way ahead of where things appear from the outside at any given time.

They've had White House metadata all along.

Pence's chief of staff has been cooperating for weeks. We all just learned about today.

And so on.

The key to all of this is to be a step ahead of the witnesses.

Let them partially cooperate, get some evidence from them, hit them for contempt anyway (Meadows).

Let them lie, then reveal you have proof that they lied, push them to flip by threatening perjury charges.

No witness who's in the thick of culpability just waltzes in and immediately decides to cooperate with bells on, just for kicks.

You have to back hostile witnesses into corners, pit them against each other, and so on.

And they gradually screw up until some of them have to cave.

You also have to pick up on things like the fact that while Pence doesn't want to cooperate against Trump, some of Pence's people are apparently more than happy to, because they've surely hated Trump all along anyway. Which the committee did figure out, and got Pence's #1 guy.

Just how did the 1/6 committee get the Trump White House metadata from Clark's letter? Either someone from the Trump White House, or a Georgia official, has provided these electronic records. Either way, it's a huge win. This is how these probes succeed.

There's still a lot we don't know about what the 1/6 committee has and what it'll do with it. But from what we can see thus far, the committee appears to be overwhelmingly succeeding. There's zero evidence that the committee is somehow blowing it.

Once you realize that 1) these things succeed when they're done strategically not frantically, 2) there are no instant magic wands the committee could be waving instead, and 3) our democracy will not be dead by this time tomorrow, you can see that the committee is nailing it.

But you have to view the committee, the probe, and the incremental caving/imploding of witnesses from a factually realistic point of view. No falling for pundits who insist the committee should be using this or that magic wand idea. No doomsday hysteria about how we're all dead.

And once you realize that media outlets and pundits have a hard time coming off as relevant if they simply admit that the committee appears to be getting everything right, you realize why they have to invent so much doomsday stuff just to have a reason to be running their mouths.