The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riots is set to begin the first in a series of public hearings Thursday night, releasing new information that says the former president Donald Trump “at the center” of a coordinated effort to overthrow the president Joe Biden2020 election victory.
The new details will show how that effort directly led to violence at the Capitol by a crowd of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021, aides on the committee told reporters on a call previewing the hearing.
Thursday’s hearing, which is scheduled to begin at 8 p.m. ET, will begin with opening statements from Committee Chair Rep. Benny Thompson, D-Miss., and Republican Vice Chair Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
The nine-member committee is expected to show videos from the day of the attack and hear testimony from Capitol Police Officer Carolyn Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury from the violence.
Also scheduled to testify is documentary filmmaker Nick Quest, who was following members of the far-right Proud Boys group prior to the riots and on the day of the invasion.
An aide to the panel said the committee would also present previously unseen records and tapes of interviews with former witnesses, including senior Trump administration officials, campaign aides and family members of the former Republican president.
An aide said Thursday’s hearing follows a 10-month investigation by a Select House committee, which has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and collected more than 140,000 documents, as well as making public the video and audio of the riots. remains.
“The selection committee will begin presenting the American people with our preliminary findings about the January 6 attack and its causes,” an aide on the panel told reporters on Wednesday afternoon. Discuss the hearing.
“We will disclose new details that the January 6 violence was the result of a coordinated, multi-stage effort to reverse the results of the 2020 election and prevent the transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and indeed the former president. At the center of the effort was Donald Trump.”
The aide also said, “Many new information will emerge [Thursday’s] Hearings beyond testimony we hear from living witnesses.”
Just two members of the panel are Republicans: Cheney, and Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, both appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., with a Democrat on the committee.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., canceled all five of his GOP candidates after Pelosi rejected two of them, Ohio Representative Jim Jordan and Indiana Rep. Jim Banks.
Cheney lost his position as GOP House convention chairman because of his participation on the committee and is now a pariah for many of his fellow Republicans.
The riot began after weeks of false claims by Trump that he had indeed won the popular vote of the 2020 presidential election, and that the Biden Electoral College victory was invalid because it was based on ballot fraud that occurred in a handful of swing states. Was.
None of the courts accepted those arguments. And Trump’s own attorney general at the time, William Barr, said the claims had no merit.
But the invasion of the Capitol delayed the confirmation of Biden’s election victory for hours by a joint session of Congress, whose members fled and hid as mobs of rioters marched through campus and into the Senate chamber itself.
Five people died in connection with the riots, including a Capitol police officer and a member of the mob, who were shot while breaking into a room adjacent to the House Chamber.
The rebellion injured more than 100 police officers and led to over 800 arrests, making it one of the largest criminal investigations in Justice Department history.
More than 300 Capitol riot defendants have pleaded guilty, and five have pleaded guilty at trial.
The next scheduled public hearing for the committee has been scheduled for Monday morning, and a third session has been scheduled for Wednesday.
The committee is likely to hold at least eight public hearings this month, after which additional sessions are possible.
The aide said the hearing represented the committee’s preliminary findings, and that “the investigation is ongoing.”
“We are looking at this as a way of disclosing our initial findings to the American people in this preliminary set of hearings,” the aide said. “Everything lays on the table for what we can see down the road.”
He noted that the panel needs to issue a final report. The panel’s chairman, Thompson, has indicated the report could come by the fall.
Even as the committee begins to publicly reveal its work, it continues to take testimony from some key witnesses.
Last month, the panel issued subpoenas to GOP House leader McCarthy and four other Republican lawmakers who voluntarily refused to cooperate with the investigation.
Some members of that group have indicated that they cannot obey those summons.
McCarthy and Jordan, one of the other Summons targets, argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that the select committee is “weaponizing the government to attack Republicans.”
Two former top Trump White House aides, Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon, have been charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the committee.
The Justice Department decided not to pursue criminal charges against former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and aide Dan Scavino after they refused to comply with the committee’s subpoenas.