The cameras left after the third hearing. The committee held two more after the public stopped paying attention. The transcripts are public. They are also, by any reasonable metric, the most useful hearings of the cycle — the ones in which the witnesses, no longer expecting to be on television, answered the questions that had not been answered in the earlier sessions.
This is not unusual. A hearing held under attention behaves differently from a hearing held without it. The questions are sharper. The answers are slower. The exchanges are less performative because there is no audience for performance.
What the late sessions said
The fourth and fifth sessions clarified two points that the first three had only gestured at. The clarification was technical. The implications were not. By the time the committee filed its final report — a document almost no one read — the central question had been resolved on the record. The press coverage of the cycle had moved on three weeks earlier and never came back.
A hearing held under attention behaves differently from a hearing held without it.
The reading exercise is short and worth doing. Pull the transcripts of the last two sessions of any major hearing of the last decade. They are usually shorter, denser, and considerably more candid than the first three. The cameras are not coming back. That is, often, when the record begins to mean something.