The House Jan. 6 select committee is expected hold at least one more hearing in September. But it has raised so many questions about the events surrounding the attack the U.S. Capitol that it’s unclear whether the panel will get to them all.
No date has been announced yet for the next hearing, and panel members have been coy about their plans. Instead, they’ve stressed how much information they’ve been collecting and how much more needs to be said.
On Thursday, the committee revealed a new area of inquiry: It asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) to testify voluntarily about his “role in spreading misinformation about the election in the days leading up to the December 14, 2020, meeting of the Electoral College.” According to the committee, “evidence shows that Mr. Gingrich pushed messages designed to incite anger among voters even after Georgia election officials had faced intimidation and threats of violence.”
In an interview Aug. 31 on MSNBC, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) cited a statement by committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) that the panel “will have at least one public hearing in September.” She added: “My guess is that it’s going to very tough to get the entire report done by the end of October, but we’ll have some key findings. There’s such a volume of information to be displayed and conveyed, and hopefully in a way that’s accessible to the American public.”
Lofgren said the committee has been grappling with two issues related to potential obstruction and witness tampering.
Noting that the Secret Service deleted records it had been told to preserve, she said, “There is a concern about some aspects of the service’s behavior, and we need to uncover it.” The committee also looking into “the possibility for coercive action” by lawyers whom “Trumpworld” paid to represent certain witnesses, she said, adding: “We are learning some more things about that that we will, at the proper time, reveal.”
How to watch
ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC and CSPAN have all been airing the hearings instead of their usual programming.
Fox News has offered live coverage of the hearings held in the morning and afternoon hours, while leaving the prime-time hearings to its less popular sibling, Fox Business.
The hearings have also been streamed on the select committee’s YouTube channel, which also offers a recording of each completed session.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) also raised the Secret Service issue on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Aug. 28, saying the committee doesn’t have a lot of the text messages sent on Jan. 6 and asking, “Why was some of that hidden?” Another issue he cited was the fundraising conducted by Trump and his campaign after the election, and “the fact that the vast majority of this money was raised under ‘Stop the Steal’ with no intention to ‘stop the steal.’”
The proceedings have been broadcast live on YouTube, the major TV networks, CNN, MSNBC and C-SPAN. Fox News has offered live coverage only of the sessions held early in the day, sticking with its regularly scheduled nightly programming and handing the prime-time hearings off to Fox Business.
Previous revelations
June 9: Illustrating just how violent the Jan. 6 attack was, Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards testified that she was “slipping in people’s blood” as she fought to defend the lawmakers inside.
June 13: The committee revealed evidence that Trump’s advisors told him repeatedly that there had been no significant fraud during the 2020 presidential election, yet he continued to spread the “Big Lie.”
June 16: A top aide to Vice President Mike Pence told of the pressure campaign by Trump and conservative California lawyer John Eastman to get Pence to reject electoral votes from seven states Biden won — even though they knew their actions were illegal.
June 21: The speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives and two election officials from Georgia, all Republicans, detailed the efforts by Trump and his lawyers to get them to reverse election results without the legal authority to do so.
June 23: Three former top Justice Department officials recounted the former president’s efforts to have the department support his unfounded claims about a tainted election, as well as his aborted effort to install an acting attorney general who backed those claims.
June 28: Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that discussions inside the White House on Jan. 6 revealed that Trump had waved off concerns about weapons in the crowd that day, that he’d wanted to go to the Capitol so badly that he’d gotten into a dispute with a Secret Service officer in his vehicle, and that he didn’t think the rioters who were chanting “Hang Mike Pence” were doing anything wrong.
July 12: Witnesses and evidence presented by the committee laid out how Trump’s call for a protest on Jan. 6 reverberated with his supporters and extremist groups, who interpreted it as a summons to stop Congress — violently, in some people’s minds — from affirming Biden’s victory in the electoral college.
July 21: Two former White House aides described how Trump ignored pleas from advisors, family members and Republicans in Congress to call off the rioters.
Future hearings
Questions about the Secret Service and Trump’s fundraising are just two of the loose threads the committee may try to tie off before this session of Congress ends, when Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) depart and the committee may be disbanded if Republicans win control of the House.
One witness yet to be heard from is former Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who was convicted in July on charges of contempt of Congress for defying the panel’s subpoena last year. In a recording obtained by Mother Jones, Bannon tells associates a few days before the 2020 election that he expects Trump to declare victory prematurely and claim the election was stolen.
“What the new Steve Bannon audio demonstrates is that Donald Trump’s plan to falsely claim victory in 2020, no matter what the facts actually were, was premeditated,” Cheney, the panel’s vice chair, said at the end of the July 21 hearing.
The panel is still seeking phone records and testimony that could shed more light about how the Jan. 6 attack fit with other efforts to overturn the election results. It has also been gathering evidence about the actions of Trump’s closest allies in Congress, and about the ties between extremist groups and Trumpworld insiders such as Roger Stone.
Finally, the resolution passed by the House to create the panel instructed it to explore how the nation’s security apparatus got blindsided by the assault on the Capitol and to recommend ways to prevent such violence in the future. But that part of its mission hasn’t gotten much attention at the hearings.
Times staff writer Sarah D. Wire contributed to this report.
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