BY MARY CLARE JALONICK
WASHINGTON (AP) — The
House Jan. 6 committee is headed back to prime time for its eighth hearing —
potentially the final time this summer that lawmakers will lay out evidence
about the U.S. Capitol insurrection and President Donald Trump’s efforts to
overturn his 2020 election defeat.
Thursday’s hearing is
expected to focus on what Trump was doing in the White House as the violence
unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who is
one of two members leading the hearing, said he expects it will “open people’s
eyes in a big way.”
This will be the panel’s
second hearing in prime time. The first, on June 9, was watched by more than 20
million people.
What to watch for in
Thursday’s hearing:
TRUMP IN THE WHITE HOUSE
Committee members have
said the hearing will be an in-depth look at what Trump was doing in the White
House that day as hundreds of his supporters violently pushed past police and
broke into the building.
The panel has already
revealed some of the Trump evidence in previous hearings, showing clips of
multiple White House aides who tried to pressure the president to act, or to
publicly call on the rioters to leave, as he watched television in a West Wing
dining room.
CAPITOL SIEGE
Jan. 6 panel probes
Trump’s 187 minutes as Capitol attacked
Steve Bannon’s defense
seeks acquittal then rests case
White House insiders to
talk about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6
Luria, Kinzinger put
careers on line in Jan. 6 investigation
But there are still
questions about what the president was doing, especially because official White
House records of Trump’s phone calls included an eight-hour gap, from a little
after 11 that morning to about 7 that evening.
The committee has tried
to fill in that gap with witness interviews and other sources, such as
subpoenaing private phone records. A panel member, Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif.,
said Trump could have called off the rioters at any time, but he did not. More
than three hours, or 187 minutes, passed before he finally did.
“The consequences we’re
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 chairwoman,
said as she previewed the hearing last week.
NEW WITNESSES
Two 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 will talk about what they saw and heard in
the White House as Trump learned about the insurrection and waited 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 didn’t believe in the stolen election.”
The committee will be
“hearing from people who were in the White House, what they observed, what
their reactions were,” Luria said.
THE WHOLE STORY
The finale in the
committee’s summer series of hearings will seek to wrap up the story the panel
has been telling from the start — that Trump was told his claims of widespread
fraud were false but pushed them anyway, without regard for democracy or the
people who were affected, and that his words and actions incited the riot at
the Capitol.
The lawmakers are
expected to give a minute-by-minute description of what happened the day of
Jan. 6, a capstone to previous hearings that examined the weeks running up to
the insurrection.
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 by the rioters.
CLIFFHANGERS
As the committee wraps up
this “season” of hearings, like a television show, there are likely 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 they holding
back any information for their final report?
At least one hearing is
expected in the fall, when the nine-member panel is expected to issue a report
on its findings, but more hearings are possible. If Republicans take control of
the House in November’s midterm elections, they are expected to shut down the
committee.
The panel’s work will
also continue to reverberate through other investigations, including at the
Justice Department, which has arrested more than 800 suspected rioters and has
seized or sought information from some of the politicians and others who were
allied with Trump as he tried to overturn the vote. The Justice Department has
asked the committee for some of its interview transcripts.
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.”
___
Associated Press writers
Kevin Freking, Farnoush Amiri and Lisa Mascaro contributed to this report.
___
Follow AP’s coverage of
the Jan. 6 committee hearings at https://apnews.com/hub/capitol-siege