The January 6 Committee The House of Representatives will return to prime time television for its eighth hearing, possibly the last time this summer that lawmakers will present evidence about the insurrection in the US Capitol and President Donald Trump‘s efforts to overturn his defeat in the elections. 2020 elections.
Thursday’s hearing is expected to focus on what Trump was doing in the White House as the violence unfolded on January 6, 2021. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who is one of two members leading the court meeting, said he hopes it will “open people’s eyes in a big way.”
This will be the panel’s second meeting in prime time. The first, on June 9, was viewed by more than 20 million people.
TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Committee members have said the hearing will be a An in-depth look at what Trump was doing in the White House that day when hundreds of his supporters violently pushed past police and entered the building.
The panel has already uncovered some of Trump’s evidence in previous hearings, showing clips of various White House aides trying to pressure the president to act or publicly call on rioters to leave, while watching television in a White House dining room. west wing.
But there are still questions about what the president was doing, especially since official White House records of Trump’s phone calls included a stretch of eight hours, from just after 11 a.m. to around 7 a.m. night.
The committee has tried to fill that void by interviewing witnesses and other sources, such as subpoenaing private phone records. One member of the panel, Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said Trump could have suspended the rioters at any time, but did not. More than three hours, or 187 minutes, passed before he finally did.
“The consequences that we are still dealing with today,” Aguilar said.
“You will hear that Donald Trump never picked up the phone that day to order his administration to help,” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the committee’s Republican vice chair, said while previewing the hearing last week.
NEW WITNESSES
The two new witnesses are former White House aides who resigned immediately after the insurrection will testify at the hearing. Former Deputy Press Secretary sarah matthews and former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger They will talk about what they saw and heard at the White House when Trump learned of the insurrection and waited for hours to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol.
Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., who will lead the hearing with Kinzinger, said the two witnesses “believed in the work they were doing, but they didn’t believe in the stolen elections.”
The committee will “hear from people who were in the White House, what they observed, what their reactions were,” Luria said.
THE COMPLETE HISTORY
The finale of the committee’s summer hearing series will seek to wrap up the story the panel has been telling all along: that Trump was told his claims of widespread fraud were false but pushed them anyway, with no regard for democracy or the people who were affected, and that his words and actions incited a riot on Capitol Hill.
Lawmakers are expected to give a minute-by-minute account of what happened on January 6, a highlight of previous hearings that examined the weeks leading up to the uprising.
A Democratic member of the committee, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, said the hearing will be about what happened in three different places on Jan. 6: the White House, inside the Capitol, and outside the Capitol, where police officers were beaten and overwhelmed. for the rioters
PENDANTS
As the committee wraps up this “season” of hearings, like a TV show, there are bound to be some cliffhangers.
Among the questions the committee may leave unanswered: Will the committee call Trump to testify? Or his vice president, Mike Pence? Will there be more hearings? Are you withholding any information for your final report?
At least one hearing is expected in the fall, when the nine-member panel is speculated to issue a report on its findings, but more hearings are possible. If Republicans take control of the House in the November midterm elections, it is a possibility that they will shut down the committee.
The panel’s work will also continue to impact other investigations, including at the Justice Department, which has arrested more than 800 suspected troublemakers and seized or sought information from some of Trump’s politicians and other allies as he tried to nullify the vote. The Justice Department has asked the committee for some of the transcripts of their interviews.
Raskin said before the hearings began that the measure of success would be “whether we are able to preserve American democracy and our institutions, it’s a long-term test.”
(with information from AP)
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Source-www.infobae.com