And you know this how?
There’s a lady sitting in jail right now because she landed her daughter a plum job for directing a major contract to Boeing, years ago.
This all came to light in closed session.
I might be one of only a handful of FReepers who has actually given testimony before a Congressional subcommittee in Executive Session.
IT is not announced to the public.
The room is “secure”.
You were only given a few days notice to appear (so that, in my case, I could gather together documents I would need to support my testimony).
You have, in my case, a Senator as the subcommittee chairman.
The General Counsel, who does the greater part of the questioning, actually runs the hearing.
Staff investigators/analysts are there if they are involved in the subject of the hearing/s.
There was a stenographer present who would transcript the testimony. They then send you a rough galley of it for corrections and omissions (hmm’s, uh’s, things like that).
Corrections included the proper spelling of names, the provision of dates for events discussed, names sanitized for security reasons or as irrelevant to the subject matter, the marking of Exhibit documents and where they were in the testimony, the addition of information relevant to what was mentioned in the hearing but which was not immediately available for the hearing, etc.
Then, in my case, it was returned to the Subcommittee’s counsel and placed under an Security Embargo. Then close to the public release of the testimony, it was placed under a media embargo.
During this time, I had been interviewed by a major US magazine about two weeks before publication time, which would coincide with the official release of the testimony.
My story was one of the cover page features of this magazine, plus I appeared in two other major magazines because of something else I was involved in. And I was interviewed the day before the release by a supposedly competent reporter/later Asst editor of a major newspaper for the story to come out the next day (He screwed it up and I had to threaten to sue the newspaper before they ran a half-assed second story. It was that event that got me into journalism since I figured that if this highly regarded man couldn’t get my published quotes correctly, then I would tell my own story, and did.
The major US magazine quoted me completely and accurately. I spent 5 hours with the senior diplomatic correspondent going through my whole story. He picked out the key points and observations/quotes I had focused on, and did a good job of putting my work into the larger context of a major national story. He was a real professional.
So that’s how an Executive Session works as well as news embargos too.
Yes, Executive Sessions, if you’ve ever read them, are the most revealing of all congressional testimonies. A smart journalist doesn’t just read the open session hearings/reports, but also goes for the Executive Session hearings/reports when they are released. They help to fill out the story as best allowed (high security information is often redacted or left out of even the ES printed hearings).
Welcome to my world, JohnG45. It is stranger than you think, but extremely exciting. I learned that in Nam.