The 1/6 Committee Hearings

So far nothing I haven’t seen before. I’m considering getting out of the US, we’re pretty fucked up.

The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol began making their case for Donald Trump’s culpability for the deadly riot Thursday night, using testimony from members of his own administration to argue that the former President was behind a coordinated conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and block the transfer of power to Joe Biden.

Within minutes of the start of the primetime hearing, which all but one of the major broadcast networks aired live, Rep. Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee’s chairman, aired the first footage from a former Trump White House official explaining under oath that they had informed the president that his claims of widespread voter fraud were false.

“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” former Attorney General William Barr told committee investigators in taped testimony, referring to a December 2020 meeting with Trump. “And I didn’t want to be a part of it.”

The committee later aired footage from a deposition with the president’s own daughter and special adviser, Ivanka Trump, who was present for that meeting and told the committee she took Barr’s comments seriously. “It affected my perspective,” she said. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”

The revelations were among the most explosive and significant of the evening. Legal experts and former prosecutors have said that any evidence that Trump was informed that he was spreading a lie to prevent Congress from certifying Biden’s election victory could implicate him on charges of intent to defraud. “It’s really important if you can prove he knew he lost, that helps bolster claims of corrupt intent and fraudulent intent,” Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and now a law professor at the University of Michigan, told TIME in April.

Other testimony from former administration officials demonstrated how Trump and his closest confidants were actively looking for ways to subvert the election outcome. Alex Cannon, Trump’s top campaign lawyer, recalled a December 2020 conversation with the president’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who asked what they had dug up to challenge the election results of decisive swing states. “We weren’t finding anything that was sufficient to change the results in key states,” Cannon told the panel. “So there’s no there there?” Meadows replied, according to Cannon.

The committee also sought to provide evidence that Trump did not take action to stop the Capitol attack as it was unfolding, even expressing approval as the mayhem unfolded. The crowd in the Cannon House Office Building hearing room collectively gasped when Rep. Liz Cheney, Republican from Wyoming and vice chair of the panel, shared testimony with the committee from inside the White House that Trump told his staff after the mob started chants to hang Vice President Mike Pence: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.”

Committee members have said the six hearings would play out almost like a Netflix series. On Thursday night, Thompson and Cheney telegraphed threads of a conspiracy they intend to bring to light over five subsequent hearings, showing how members of two far-right groups in particular, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, were working well in advance to prepare for the Capitol invasion, with much of those efforts spurred by Trump’s statements. On Tuesday, the Justice Department indicted five members of the Proud Boys on counts of seditious conspiracy—a charge that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in jail.

One of the most evocative moments of the first hearing was when the committee showed harrowing documentary footage of the Jan. 6 attack, interspersed with clips of Trump’s speech at a rally near the White House and screenshots of his tweets throughout the day. As the Capitol was under attack—and the building was breached by violent insurrectionists—Trump refused to call in the military or National Guard to protect Congress, leaving the vice president to do so instead.

“Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets,” Cheney said. “But Mike Pence did each of those things.”

The video footage stirred many of the Capitol Hill police officers who attended the hearing and had to relive the trauma of the attack. “I can’t say I’m surprised anymore,” one of the officers, Harry Dunn, told TIME after the hearing, referring to the revelation of Trump’s refusal to call for reinforcements. “You’ve got a job to protect not just us but this country and you didn’t.”

Cheney said there was evidence presented to the committee to prove that Trump was aware that the crowd that showed up to support him that day was likely to turn violent but chose to whip them up anyway. “The White House was receiving specific reports, including during Trump’s Ellipse rally, that elements in the crowd were preparing for violence.”

Committee members wanted to convey that these were intentional choices by the president to prevent Biden’s election certification, triggering a failure in the Electoral College that Trump hoped would lead to a contingent election in the House of Representatives. It was through that scenario that Trump’s allies, such as law professor John Eastman, intended to bring in a new slate of electors who would reinstall Trump as president.

“All Americans should keep in mind this fact,” Cheney said. “On the morning of Jan. 6, Donald Trump’s intention was to remain President of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the election.”

The video presentation also showed how Trump’s remarks in the first 2020 presidential debate—telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by”—led to increased membership in the far-right extremist group and energized its leaders to fight against a Trump election loss.

The violent role of the Proud Boys took center stage during the final portion of Thursday’s hearing, when two witnesses testified in person. Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police Officer who sustained a brain injury from the attack, described the moment when insurrectionists moved to breach the Capitol as a “war scene,” providing vivid and at times graphic detail of the onslaught. “It was something like I had seen out of the movies,” she said. “I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding, they were throwing up. I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood.”

Filmmaker Nick Quested, who followed the Proud Boys in the days leading up to the attack, was the second witness. Much of the documentary footage the committee aired was shot by him. “I documented the crowd turn from protestors, to rioters, to insurrectionists,” he told the House panel.

Thompson told reporters after the hearing that the aim of the first session was to stick with the facts the investigation uncovered. “We made a conscious effort to only put on what we could prove,” he said. Yet that is unlikely to sway the majority of Republican leaders who continue to downplay the severity of the attack, leaving the door open, some committee members have said, for such an episode to repeat itself.

Toward the end of the 11-minute video presentation—as insurrectionists could be seen beating police officers and breaking through the windows of the Capitol—the montage reached its dramatic climax by playing audio from remarks Trump made months later. “They were peaceful people. These were great people,” he said of the rioters. “The love in the air—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

So Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, damned her Republican colleagues at tonight's first hearing on the January 6 insurrection.

And that was only a piece of what we heard tonight.

Calmly, carefully, convincingly, and in plain, easy to understand language, committee leaders Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Cheney placed former president Donald Trump at the center of an attempt to overturn our democracy. They were very clear that what happened on January 6 was an attempted coup, an “attempt to undermine the will of the people.” All Americans should remember, they reminded us, that on the morning of January 6, Donald Trump intended to remain president, despite his loss in the 2020 election and his constitutional obligation to step down in favor of President-elect Joseph R. Biden, as every president before him had done.

The committee established that there was no fraud in the 2020 election that would have changed the results of the election, showing testimony from Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr that the argument that Trump had won was “bullsh*t.” The committee presented testimony from other administration figures, including Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and his daughter Ivanka, that Trump had been told repeatedly that he had lost. And yet, even with his inner circle telling him he had lost, and even with more than 60 failed lawsuits over the election, Trump continued to lie that he had been cheated of victory.

It was Trump who “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame” for January 6, the committee says. Unable to accept his loss and determined to remain in power, Trump organized and deployed an attack on our democracy.

The committee established that the attack on the Capitol was not a random, spontaneous uprising. The rioters came at Trump’s invitation. While they had been muttering about the results since immediately after the election, it was Trump’s tweet of December 19, 2020, that lit the fuse. That night, the former president met with lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and others at the White House. Shortly after the meeting, Trump tweeted that it was “[s]tatistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Members of the extremist organizations the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers took Trump’s December 19th tweet as a call to arms. On December 20, they began to organize to go to Washington. These radical white supremacists had taken great pride in Trump’s shout-out in a presidential debate on September 29 that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” After that comment, membership in the Proud Boys had tripled.

Members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers testified that they went to Washington because Trump personally asked them to. “Trump has only asked me for two things,” one man testified: “my vote, and he asked me to come on January 6.”

The committee provided evidence that 250 to 300 Proud Boys arrived in Washington to stop the counting of the electoral votes. Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker working to film the gang, testified that the riot was not spontaneous: the Proud Boys, who were allegedly in Washington to hear Trump speak, walked away from the rally at the Ellipse even before then-president Trump spoke, walking to the Capitol and checking out the police presence there. The Oath Keepers, too, were in Washington to stop the count and were expecting Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, enabling them to fight for him to remain president.

The groups quite deliberately fought their way into the Capitol in a planned and coordinated attack. Meanwhile, Trump continued to stoke the crowd’s fury at then–vice president Mike Pence for refusing to overturn the election in his role as the person in charge of counting the certified electoral votes. The rioters stormed the Capitol and went in search of Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), their calls for “Oh, Nancy,” echoing like the singsong chant from a horror movie. When he learned that the rioters were chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” the president said: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” He said that Pence “deserves it.”

Videos of the violence outside the Capitol further undercut the attempt of Republicans to downplay the rioters as “tourists.” Asked by Thompson if any one memory from January 6 stood out to her, Officer Caroline Edwards, who fought to protect the Capitol, said yes: the scene of “carnage” and “chaos.” It was like a war scene from the movies, she said, with officers bleeding on the ground, vomiting. She was slipping in people’s blood, catching people as they fell. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think… I would find myself in the middle of a battle,” she said. More than 100 police officers were wounded in the fighting, attacked with cudgels and bear spray, and at least nine people died then and immediately after.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) was only one of many people caught up in the violence to contact Trump and beg him to call off the rioters. Clearly, Republicans as well as Democrats knew the mob were his people and that they would respond to his instructions. And yet, he refused. He did nothing to call out the military or the National Guard to defend the Capitol.

Ultimately, those requests came from Vice President Pence, in what appears so far to be an unexplained breakdown in the usual chain of command. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley testified that Pence was very clear that the military needed to turn up and fast to “put down this situation.” In contrast, Meadows talked to Milley not about protecting the Capitol, but to say “we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions.” Milley said he saw this as “politics, politics, politics.”

After the attempt to overturn the election and keep Trump in power had failed, according to Cheney, Representative Scott Perry (R-PA) and “multiple other Republican congressmen” tried to get Trump to pardon them for their participation. While they are now insisting they did nothing wrong, the requests for a presidential pardon show that they were aware that they were in trouble.

After the hearing, CNN congressional correspondent Ryan Nobles talked to Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who is on the committee. “It’s actually a pretty simple story of a president who lost, who couldn’t stand losing, who cared nothing about the constitution and was determined to hold on to power and who incited a mob when everything else failed,” Schiff said.

The hearing provided some new information about the January 6 coup attempt that had not previously been publicly available. It also put what we already knew into a clear and compelling narrative using the words of Trump’s own advisors, including his daughter, and video previously unseen by the public. That story singled Trump out as the author of an attack on our democracy and isolated him even from those in his inner circle in a way that could weaken his influence in his party.

At the same time, the committee’s presentation was horrifying, reviving the pain of January 6 and clarifying it by bringing together the many different storylines that we have previously seen only in isolation. The timeline juxtaposed the mob violence with Trump’s own statements about how Pence was letting them down, for example. It showed Officer Edwards being knocked unconscious while Trump claimed the mob was made up of “peaceful people… great people,” and described “the love in the air, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Pundits had speculated before tonight’s televised hearing that it would not make compelling television, but they could not have been more wrong. The Fox News Channel, some of whose personalities were involved in the events surrounding January 6, refused to air the proceedings. Nonetheless, that channel inadvertently proved just how powerful the hearing was when it ran Tucker Carlson’s show without commercial breaks, apparently afraid that if anyone began to channel surf they might be drawn in by the hearing on other channels.

Veteran reporter Bob Woodward called the evening “historic.” Looking back at the 1954 hearings that destroyed the career of Senator Joe McCarthy by revealing that he was lying to the American public, Woodward said that tonight’s event “was the equivalent of the Army-McCarthy hearings."

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has postponed its Wednesday hearing slated to review former President Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to investigate his unfounded claims of election fraud.

In an advisory, the committee said its scheduled hearing on Thursday would still take place but provided no other details.

Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his deputy Richard Donoghue and Steven Engle, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, were all expected to appear before the committee on Wednesday.

“There’s no big deal, but I’ll tell you the putting together the video and exhibits is an exhausting exercise for our very small video staff. So we’re trying to — we were going to have 1-2-3 in one week and it’s just it’s too much to put it all together. So we’re trying to give them a little room to do their technical work, is mainly it,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), one of the committee’s members, said on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC on Tuesday.

Rosen and Donoghue were some of the committee’s earliest witnesses to voluntarily testify before the panel’s investigators and also spoke with the Senate Judiciary Committee for a report it released in October.


“In our third hearing, you will see that President Trump corruptly planned to replace the attorney general so the U.S. Justice Department would spread his false stolen election claims,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair of the select committee, said during the panel’s first hearing on Thursday to preview its coming work.

“In the days before Jan. 6, President Trump told his top Justice Department officials: ‘Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.’”

Trump’s pressure campaign at the Justice Department was reported just days after President Biden took office in a New York Times report detailing a remarkable meeting during which Trump said he would install a mid-level lawyer as his attorney general in order to forward an investigation into election fraud claims in Georgia and other states.

Donoghue told the committee he told Trump, “What you are proposing is nothing less than the United States Justice Department meddling in the outcome of a presidential election.”

The delay is the latest stumbling block for the committee, after Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, failed to appear at Monday’s hearing because his wife went into labor.

The committee pivoted to showing numerous recorded clips from his prior deposition with investigators, but it delayed the hearing’s start by 45 minutes and removed one of the star witnesses from the lineup.

I think the next hearing date is going to be Wednesday, June 15.

I’m glad they’re doing the hearings, and that they are being broadcast.