WASHINGTON — The first time the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection gathered for a public hearing, members heard from law enforcement officers who were physically assaulted, verbally abused and traumatized by pro-Donald Trump rioters who stormed the building.
On that day, in late July 2021, lawmakers on the panel thanked four officers — two from the Capitol Police and two from the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department — for defending American democracy from a violent effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
“You held the line that day. I can’t overstate what was on the line: our democracy,” said Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. “You held the line.”
Much of the work the committee has been conducting since last summer’s hearing has been in private. That is aside from public announcements of subpoenas, legal battles between the committee and Trump allies over whether executive privilege shields them from having to comply with the its requests, and business meetings to recommend certain noncompliant associates of the former president be held in contempt of Congress.
Starting with a prime-time hearing Thursday at 8 p.m., the committee will begin to tell the public what it has found — the product of more than 1,000 interviews and over 140,000 documents. A second hearing is set for June 13 at 10 a.m.
“I am very confident that the committee has both blockbuster information and will also build a compelling narrative of a vast conspiracy started long before January,” said Norman Ornstein, senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute. “I don’t think the issue is going to be the failure to produce gripping information. It will be whether enough people pay attention, and whether their attention span is such that it will carry over into November and beyond.”
The panel will present previously unseen material documenting the day of the Capitol attack, receive witness testimony, preview additional hearings to come this month and give a summary of what it discovered about what it has dubbed a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power.”
There are nine members on the panel. The seven Democrats are Thompson along with Reps. Zoe Lofgren, Adam B. Schiff and Pete Aguilar of California, Elaine Luria of Virginia, Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Jamie Raskin of Maryland. On the Republican side are Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who serves as the vice chair. Both Kinzinger and Cheney became outcasts of the House Republican Conference for calling out Trump’s election lies. Cheney was purged from her role as conference chair, the No. 3 position among House Republicans, in May 2021 and replaced with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, an unwavering Trump supporter.
Ultimately, the committee plans to make legislative proposals geared toward preventing another attack like Jan. 6 from occurring. Along with the hearings, forthcoming reports with findings from the panel’s investigative work and legislative recommendations are the committee’s “touchstones” in terms of a timeline, Aguilar told CQ Roll Call in May.
“All the information is going to be included in one of those buckets, or multiple buckets, to tell the story,” Aguilar said.
Q. What will the hearings look like?
The panel has heard from a wide range of witnesses, including from Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner — both senior presidential advisers on Jan. 6, 2021 — and Cassidy Hutchinson, a staffer for Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, The Washington Post reported. It has also met with Ali Alexander, who helped organize the “Stop the Steal” rally held that day near the White House, according to The New York Times. Former House Sergeant-at-Arms Paul D. Irving, one of the top officials tasked with Capitol security on Jan. 6, provided testimony to the panel.
How exactly the committee will mesh everything it has learned into a series of televised presentations is unclear. Thompson has asked specific members to take the lead in particular components of the upcoming hearings.
“We want to make sure that the members have specific responsibilities for managing the hearings and, you know, I have basically asked certain members to handle certain aspects of the hearings,” he said in May.
The chairman has also said there could be a combination of live in-person and video-recorded witness testimony.