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I’ve said this before: This is as a direct result of the amateurish pursuit of this case by Issa.

Issa has no law degree. He is a serious-appearing guy, but the failure of this effort is sabotaging him, badly. He insists, for whatever reason(s), upon acting like an attorney in terms of educing facts from witness testimony. This is an absolutely critical litigation skill and if misapplied or ineffectively done, allows all manner of evasion to go on. This is not “fair play” because the other side spares no effort nor expense in paying for legal skills as it tries to deflect from the investigative effort led by Issa. And the clever way to deflect not only deflects, it establishes the questioner and his effort as mis-—something. Misapplied, mistaken, misguided.

Levin went into this in the first hour of his show today.

Issa does not realize the damage he is doing and that is the central crux of my point here. Any skilled atty would have physically impounded those drive from the beginning: and maybe those drives had crashed at that juncture. (that possibility being utterly irrelevant to whether or not these emails are retrievable; any IT expert knows full well these emails are retrievable) What it does, it shows, nay, it PROVES, that the investigation is being handled by an amateur. Infinitely more skilled attys immediately detect this failure to seize evidence and proceed to lay every trap that Issa has walked into since that first day. Because he does not know enough to know he is being played and is dutifully walking into every trap the other side lays. The end result is going to failure on a colossal scale.

Likewise, on the other scandals into which Congress has held hearings, nothing ever seems to result. Why is that? It is because the event is kabuki theater, it is grandstanding by pretend-attorneys who do not have cross-examination skills. So we get “Thank you for your service” when these people have been paid handsomely for their service and have their pensions paid for and it’s not like they risked any broken bones or anything. But the point is that the more the questioning sessions lead to nothingburgers, the more it appears that any one investigation itself is bogus.