Empty chairs are visible before the opening of the public hearing of the House of Representatives Commission to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, June 9, 2022.
Jonathan Ernst Reuters
A House of Representatives selection committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot has postponed its third hearing, scheduled for Wednesday, and was expected to reveal how former President Donald Trump claimed he forced the Justice Department to spread false allegations that the 2020 elections were manipulated against him.
Former Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former Justice Department officials Richard Donohue and Steve Engel were expected to testify in person at the hearing, NBC News reported, citing Rosen’s lawyer.
The commission has not set a new date for the hearing, but is scheduled to hold a separate hearing on Thursday, the commission said.
It was not clear from the commission’s statement whether these witnesses would be moved to Thursday or another date, and a commission spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, the commission launched a series of seven hearings detailing its initial findings from a nearly year-long investigation into the January 6, 2021 attack, when a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol. The riot sent members of Congress to flee for safety and delayed lawmakers’ confirmation of President Joe Biden’s election college victory.
The nine-member commission seeks to show that Trump is primarily to blame for the uprising by placing him at the center of a multilateral conspiracy to undo his loss in the 2020 election.
On Monday, the commission released details that focused heavily on a wide range of election fraud conspiracies that Trump and some of his allies caught and spread widely to try to convince the public that the election had been stolen.
The commission released a long series of videos of interviews with former Trump officials, including former Attorney General William Barr, who repeatedly told the former president he had lost to Biden legally and warned Trump not to make baseless allegations of fraud.
“I told him that these are crazy things and they are wasting their time on this and this is doing a serious disservice to the country,” Bar told investigators.
“I was a little demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes in these things, he’s lost touch with – he’s detached from reality, if he really believes in these things,” Bar said at another point. “There has never been an indication of interest in what the real facts are.”
Wednesday’s postponed hearing was supposed to show how Trump tried to “corrupt” the DOJ as part of his attempt to challenge the 2020 election and how his agency leaders rejected it, Liz Cheney Vice President L-Cheyen said. last week.
Cheney, one of the two Republicans on the committee, suggested that the hearing would detail Trump’s attempt to appoint Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department attorney, as acting attorney general, and get him to send letters to key states, falsely claiming that the government has found evidence that could affect election results.
The hearing will reveal how senior Justice Department officials threatened to resign and confronted Trump and Clark in the Oval Office, Cheney said.
She also suggested that the hearing would shed new light on efforts by some Republican lawmakers to secure a pardon for the president “for their role in trying to cancel the 2020 election.” She has already named spokesman Scott Perry, R-Pa., Who is said to have tried to get Clark promoted. Perry refuses to testify before the commission.
It is unclear whether Thursday’s hearing will focus on the Department of Justice or whether the committee will move on to its next planned focus: how Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the Electoral College.
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