The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 is holding six public hearings, according to a draft schedule.
ABC, CNN and MSNBC are expected to focus their coverage on the hearings and many other outlets are likely to show the hearings on their websites and YouTube channels, including The Independent.
The hearings will also be shown live on C-SPAN.
The committee’s fifth hearing of the summer is set for Thursday 23 June at 3pm ET. It will focus on the wrangling among the Trump administration’s top legal appointees and certain Trump allies who jockeyed to influence the Justice Department’s response to the election.
Committee chair Bennie Thompson said this week that because of the volume of new evidence his panel has received since the televised hearings began, the original schedule is being revised, with next week’s sessions postponed so the process can resume in July.
Tuesday’s hearing featured two Georgia Republican election officials, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his Chief Operating Officer Gabe Sterling, alongside Republican Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who described the emotional impact of a pressure campaign the president’s team mounted against him.
In a phone call in January of last year, then-President Donald Trump pressured Mr Raffensperger to “find” enough votes for Mr Trump to win the state. Mr Raffensperger resisted Mr Trump’s efforts. President Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since Bill Clinton in 1992.
Mr Raffensperger has previously spoken to the committee about the call in private. Mr Trump has rejected assertions that he did anything wrong.
The hearings so far have outlined how Mr Trump and some of his associates violated the law as they tried to overturn the 2020 election, according to reports.
“We want to paint a picture as clear as possible as to what occurred,” committee chairman Bennie Thompson told reporters last month ahead of the proceedings.
“The public needs to know what to think. We just have to show clearly what happened on January 6.”
The plan is for a different committee member to lead each of the hearings, but attorneys who know the sensitive material well will conduct most of the questioning of witnesses. Attorneys will also show texts, photos and videos to strengthen their case.
The panel has detailed the Trump team’s effort to overturn his loss in the more than two months from when he falsely claimed to have won the 2020 election until the Capitol riot on 6 January.
In a March court filing, the committee said that “the president’s rhetoric persuaded thousands of Americans to travel to Washington for January 6, some of whom marched on the Capitol, breached security, and took other illegal actions”.
“Hearings will address those issues in detail”, they added.
Source: Independent
