US

January 6th committee’s primetime final public hearing to recount 187 minutes of chaos at US Capitol

Committee to outline how Trump failed to quell violence in Washington last year

The House select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on July 12th, 2022. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times

Joan E Greve in Washington
Thu Jul 21 2022 - 14:38

The January 6th committee is returning to prime time. The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection will hold its eighth and final (for now, at least) public hearing on Thursday night.

Like the first hearing, Thursday’s event will take place in the evening, as the panel seeks to capture the widest possible audience for its presentation. The first hearing, which was held last month, was watched by at least 20 million people.

The eighth hearing will detail the 187 minutes that passed between the start and the end of the insurrection on that winter afternoon in 2021, as a mass of Donald Trump’s more extreme supporters overran the US Capitol in a vain attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 presidential election.

Democrat Elaine Luria, who will co-lead the Thursday hearing with fellow panel member and Republican Adam Kinzinger, said the committee will provide a “minute-by-minute” account of the insurrection, as Mr Trump failed to quell the violence that left several people dead.

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Released excerpts from the US congressional probe of the attack on the US Capitol show witnesses saying Donald Trump watched events unfold on television. (Reuters)

“He didn’t act. He had a duty to act. So we will address that in a lot of detail,” Ms Luria said on Sunday. “And from that, we will build on the information that we provided in the earlier hearings.”

One central committee member, Democratic chair Bennie Thompson, will not be attending the hearing in person. Mr Thompson tested positive for coronavirus on Monday, but will chair the hearing remotely, a committee aide said.

Two former Trump White House aides who resigned shortly after January 6th, Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, are expected to testify on Thursday.

Mr Pottinger served in the Trump administration for four years and resigned as a deputy national security adviser, while Ms Matthews was a White House press aide.

When she announced her resignation last year, Ms Matthews expressed dismay about the events of January 6th, and she has continued to criticise Mr Trump.

Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked for former US president Donald Trump’s chief of staff, testifies on June 28th before the House committee investigating the January 6th, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times

After former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson appeared before the select committee last month, Ms Matthews came to her defence, even as some of Mr Trump’s allies dismissed the shocking testimony as “hearsay”.

“Anyone downplaying Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t understand how the Trump [White House] worked or is attempting to discredit her because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is,” Ms Matthews said on Twitter at the time.

Ms Hutchinson’s testimony is expected to feature prominently in the Thursday hearing. In her appearance before the committee, Ms Hutchinson, a former adviser to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, painted a damning picture of an increasingly chaotic White House led by a president determined to hold on to power, even after he was repeatedly told he had fairly lost the election, including by his own attorney general, William Barr.

According to Ms Hutchinson, Mr Trump was aware that some of his supporters were armed on January 6th, yet he still encouraged them to march to the Capitol after he spoke at a rally near the White House.

Ms Hutchinson also provided a second-hand account of Mr Trump grabbing for the steering wheel of a vehicle in a desperate attempt to go to the Capitol with his supporters, having said at the rally “I’ll be there with you”. Instead he returned to the White House.

Some of Ms Hutchinson’s testimony relied on comments she heard from Pat Cipollone, Mr Trump’s former White House counsel. Mr Cipollone privately spoke to the January 6th investigators shortly after Ms Hutchinson testified, and the committee is expected to show more of his interview during the Thursday hearing.

The committee had also hoped to gather more information from the US Secret Service before the Thursday hearing, about Mr Trump and Mr Pence’s movements on the day, but that effort is proving far more difficult than anticipated. After receiving a subpoena for all agency communications on January 5th and 6th, the Secret Service turned over just one text message to the select committee, an aide to the panel confirmed.

The committee has promised to continue collecting information from important witnesses as it works to compile a comprehensive report on the Capitol attack by this fall, and additional hearings are still possible later in the summer.

“There is no reason to think that this is going to be the select committee’s final hearing,” a committee aide said on Wednesday. “The multi-step plan, overseen and directed by the former president, to overturn the results of the election and block the transfer of power couldn’t be clearer from the information that we’ve laid out. We expect that [the panel] is going to continue telling that story.” — Guardian

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