On the one hand I have no issues with how the January 6th criminals have been dealt with or the workings of the January 6th Select Committee I can fully see how justice is not always being served.
In the last hour or so I read the following in this book:
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Oppenheimer’s friend Joseph Volpe later said the proceeding was “like a hearing on your wife after you’ve been married twenty years.” In his dozen years of government service Oppenheimer had been through four high-level reviews, among them the 1947 review in which Hoover and Strauss had agreed to clearance.3 This new proceeding was unlike any of the others in that it resembled a criminal trial, with the burden of proof on one side only: the defense. It was held in a dilapidated government building with only lawyers, witnesses, and a handful of officials present. The location was not announced, reporters were not permitted—indeed, they were not formally told that it was happening—and each witness was informed as he took the stand that the proceeding was “confidential,” meaning that he was not supposed to speak about it with anyone outside the hearing room and that government representatives would not do so either. On completion of the proceeding, the Gray board was to vote on whether Oppenheimer’s clearance should be restored, and it was understood that, either way, the verdict would be appealed. The defense decided at the outset that, should it lose, it would not appeal within the federal court system. Instead, the five commissioners would act as the court of final appeal. In an improvised, and egregious, intermediate step, once the Gray board rendered its decision, AEC general manager Kenneth Nichols, who had signed the original letter of charges, sent the commissioners his recommendations. The government made up rules as it went along, and the defense was not consulted about what the rules should be. Lloyd Garrison objected again and again that he did not know what type of proceeding it was—was it a trial, with the normal protections of the courtroom?—but in the fear-laden climate of the day, his objections were overruled, and Chairman Gray even reprimanded him for making them.
The whole affair was after the fact: Oppenheimer’s contract as an AEC consultant was to expire on June 30, and Strauss was free at any time before that to cancel the contract, which would automatically have precipitated revocation of his Q clearance. Instead, paradoxically, members of the Gray board and the AEC commissioners had to rush the writing of their opinions in order to get a verdict in before the contract was to lapse. With common sense turned on its head, it is impossible to escape the conclusion that Strauss’s determination to win at any cost was colored by an implacable desire for revenge.
The week before the hearing began, Gray, Morgan, and Evans were closeted with three thousand pages of documents—Borden’s letter, the denunciations by Pitzer, Teller, and Latimer, other items from Oppenheimer’s FBI file—compiled by the prosecution. Roger Robb, the outside prosecutor hired for the case, and his chief assistant, C. Arthur Rolander, were on hand to interpret, and with the board members taking meals together every day, Robb very often ate with them. Not only was the defense prevented from seeing the documents the board members were reading: it was not told what the documents were or what they contained. Silverman called the board’s prehearing immersion in files that the defense was not allowed to see “unheard of,” while Green later said that the board members emerged “brainwashed,” coming to the presentation of testimony steeped in the prosecution’s case and on friendly terms with the prosecutor himself. But when Garrison asked to meet with the board, he was brusquely refused. There was no discovery process and no rules of evidence. The defense, mistakenly assuming that the proceeding might bear some resemblance to a normal trial, furnished the prosecution with the names of its witnesses ahead of time, but when Garrison asked for a list of prosecution witnesses, Robb refused and was upheld by Gordon Gray. Meanwhile, knowing in advance who the defense witnesses were to be, Robb repeatedly embarrassed them with disclosures from their FBI files.
The biggest handicap of all for the defense was its lack of security clearance. Many of the documents entered in testimony had been confiscated from Oppenheimer’s files and some had even been written by Oppenheimer himself, but now they were classified and no one on the defense team was permitted to see them. Prior to the hearing, the AEC had offered to expedite a clearance for Garrison but refused to extend the offer to Silverman and Marks, and Garrison withdrew his request. (The truth, which the prosecution did not want to tell Garrison, was that they anticipated difficulty clearing Marks, a liberal who had been a close adviser to Acheson in the State Department.) As opening day approached, however, Garrison, anxious that Oppenheimer not be left unrepresented in the hearing room, renewed his request for clearance. Strauss refused outright, instructing Nichols to “make it perfectly clear to Garrison that we offered to do this last January and … we won’t give any special consideration to this and should not give him emergency clearance.” (Robb, of course, had been cleared in just a few days.) Several times Robb declassified a document on the spot, while questioning a witness, but refused to let the defense attorneys see it on grounds that they were not cleared. Barred by classification rules even from seeing Oppenheimer’s FBI file, the defense lawyers were unaware both of derogatory items they should try to answer and positive items that might help their client. It was like trying to defend someone while blindfolded and with one arm tied behind one’s back.4
At 