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After nearly a year, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol finally presented its findings to the public in a highly-anticipated public hearing on Thursday night.
The Democrat-led panel spent 11 months searching for what caused last year’s insurrection, when Donald Trump‘s supporters attempted to stop Congress from certifying the ballots for Joe Biden‘s electoral victory.
Armed with hundreds of witness testimonies, thousands of hours’ worth of footage, and more than 100,000 pages of evidence, lawmakers believe they can contextualize the Capitol riot into a wider scheme by Trump and his allies to undermine American democracy and the 2020 election.
‘I think it’s really important for the American people to understand how the attack unfolded, to understand what provoked the attack,’ the committee’s vice chair, Republican Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, said on Dispatch Live Tuesday.
The panel even reportedly recruited former ABC News president James Goldston to shape their combination of footage, live testimony, images and videotaped depositions into a blockbuster presentation of evidence.
When is the hearing?
The first of six sessions started at 8pm on Thursday evening.
The following hearing is scheduled for 10am on Monday, June 13.
It’s not yet clear when the next four will be, but two more are expected next week, according to the New York Times.
The following week will reportedly see the remaining two hearings.
The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol has heard from more than 1,000 witnesses
How can I watch?
There are a number of ways to watch the primetime hearing both online and on television.
DailyMail.com will be carrying its own live stream of the event as well as live blog coverage.
Every major broadcast network is interrupting scheduled television to carry the hearing live.
Two of the ‘big three’ cable networks – CNN and MSNBC – will follow suit.
Fox News has announced it would not show the event, meaning viewers there will instead tune in to Tucker Carlson’s regularly scheduled time slot.
Who is testifying?
The committee is hearing from British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested and Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards on Thursday, DailyMail.com has learned.
Quested was embedded with the far-right group and would have video evidence of its members’ confrontations with law enforcement outside of the Capitol as well as other key findings about its activity.
The panel, assembled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is made up of seven Democrat lawmakers and two Republicans
He was also in the room for a meeting between Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, the leader of another far-right group called the Oath Keepers, Politico reported.
On the other side of the conflict that day, Edwards will testify about her experience defending the Capitol against rioters.
She was injured in a dust-up linked to Proud Boys members while defending the complex that day and suffered a concussion.
Beyond those live testimonies, the committee is also expected to show some of the hundreds of hours’ worth of video-taped depositions it has recorded over the last 11 months.
Nick Quested is a filmmaker who had been documenting the Proud Boys on and before January 6
Viewers could see part of the hours-long interviews of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, the ex-president’s daughter and son-in-law who were also his senior White House advisers when the riot took place. Sources told the Washington Post late last week that their testimonies will make for ‘gripping television’ if they are eventually shown during the hearings.
The outlet also reported that a central focus of the hearings in general will be the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, who was an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the insurrection.
Hutchinson last month reportedly told the panel that Trump was supportive of rioters chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence’ – while the former vice president was still within the Capitol complex.
The former aide is likely to testify live in addition to what she told the committee behind closed doors, the Saturday report states.
What will I learn?
The combination of videos and images with live testimony is aimed at showing the American public how close their democracy came to the breaking point.
‘It’s a pretty dramatic story and it has to be told in a dramatic way,’ Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff told NPR.
The panel is also expected to hear from the other side of the conflict with testimony from Capitol cop Caroline Edwards (pictured on CBS Evening News), who is thought to be the first officer injured while defending the complex on January 6
Thursday’s hearing is expected to provide an overview of events on the day of the Capitol riot and contextualize it in Trump’s wider alleged plot to overturn his presidential election loss.
‘I think that we will be in a position to show, sort of, an initial set of findings and to begin to walk through what happened and to make sure that we’re taking steps necessary, legislatively, so that it never happens again,’ Cheney said on Tuesday.
The Wyoming conservative told Dispatch Live that the coming weeks will also feature damning evidence on Trump from his former allies themselves.
‘You will hear from Republicans who worked in his administration. You’ll hear from Republican state officials,’ she said.
‘You’ll hear from people who understood that the election had been lost, for example, who told him that there was not fraud at a level that would have overturned the results.’
And Quested and Edwards’ testimonies are a sign that lawmakers’ first in a series of six hearings will focus heavily on the Proud Boys, who have been accused of playing a central role in instigating the violence that day and coordinating Trump supporters toward the Capitol.
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