The House of Representatives selection committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol will hold the second of several public hearings Monday morning at 10 a.m. ET to uncover some of what it learned during its 11-month inspection. .
The hearing will be broadcast as a special CBS News report hosted by CBS Evening News presenter and managing editor Nora O’Donnell. She will be joined by CBS News chief political analyst John Dickerson, Washington chief correspondent Major Garrett, White House chief correspondent Nancy Cordes, election and campaign chief correspondent Robert Costa, and congressional correspondents Scott McFarlane and Nicole Killian.
Commission officials said Monday’s hearing would focus on the “Big Lie”, documenting how former President Donald Trump declared victory on election night, despite being told there were no numbers to win, and how he continued to accept baseless allegations. for electoral fraud.
“We will hear testimony from government officials who have sought fraud and about how efforts to uncover these baseless allegations have failed,” said a commission official. “It’s just that the scam they were looking for didn’t exist and the former president was told that the allegations were unfounded over and over again, but he still kept repeating them.
Monday’s hearing will have two witness panels. The first panel will consist of former Trump campaign manager William Stephen and former Fox News political director Chris Stewert, who was released by Fox News shortly after the 2020 presidential election, during which his team rightly called Arizona for Joe Biden before other networks. The second panel will consist of election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia BJP, who resigned on January 4, 2021, and former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmid.
Some witnesses are expected to testify about the basic logistics of electoral litigation and how such actions usually proceed. A commission aide said the commission would also demonstrate that Trump campaign aides used allegations of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars between the January 6 election and the election. Finally, the aide said the committee would show that “some of those responsible for the violence of the 6th repeated the same lies that the former president spread on the eve of the uprising.”
Representative Benny Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and chairman of the House of Representatives selection committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, spoke during a prime time hearing in Washington, DC, on June 9, 2022. Ting Shen / Bloomberg via Getty Images
Commission Vice-Chair Liz Cheney said last week that a second hearing would show that “Donald Trump and his advisers knew he had actually lost the election.”
“However, President Trump has made great efforts to spread false and fraudulent information – to convince large sections of the US population that fraud has stolen the election from him. That’s not true, “Cheney said at Thursday’s hearing.
Cheney and committee chairman Benny Thompson chaired the first public hearing on Thursday. In that hearing, the commission sought to link Trump’s baseless allegations of stolen elections to the chaos and violence of Jan. 6, which Thompson described as “the culmination of a coup attempt.”
Testimonies were shown to some of the top figures in Trump’s orbit, who said they had told him he had not won the election. Thompson released a recording of the testimony of former Attorney General William Barr to the commission, in which he said he had told the former president that his allegations of stolen elections were “nonsense **”. In another video, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, said she “trusted” Bar and accepted his insistence that her father had lost the election.
Cheney also said there were members of Congress who had asked for clemency from Trump for his role in the attack. Cheney named Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania as one of those Republicans, a statement he denied on Friday.
Representative Adam Kinzinger, Cheney’s Republican counterpart on the committee, told Face the Nation on Sunday that “we will not make accusations or say things without evidence or evidence to support it.”
Kinzinger says the commission will present evidence on January 6 that lawmakers have asked for pardon from Trump 08:20
On Thursday, Cheney spoke harshly to Republicans who agreed with Trump after the attack: “The day will come when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonesty will remain.”
In addition to recorded testimony and some unprecedented January 6 footage shown at the first hearing, two witnesses testified: documentary filmmaker Nick Custed, who was cast in the Proud Boys during the riot, and Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards. who suffered a traumatic brain injury on January 6. Edwards described seeing a “military scene” on January 6.
“It was something I had seen in the movies,” Edwards said. “I could not believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were vomiting. I saw friends with blood on their faces. I slipped in people’s blood. I caught people falling. it was a massacre. It was chaos. ”
A Capitol police officer describes “flap” and “chaos” during an attack on January 6 1:07 p.m.
The hearing also touched on the role of the Proud Boys in the January 6 attack. In a video testimony shown Thursday, some members of the group said they believed Trump’s remark during the presidential debate to “step back and stay away” was a call to action. Quested testified that the Proud Boys were organized and headed to the Capitol at 10 a.m. before Trump’s speech at the Ellipse even began.
Thompson and Cheney tried to show that in the face of the chaos in the Capitol, Trump was not fulfilling his duties as president. They showed video testimony from General Mark Millie, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that former Vice President Pence, not Trump, had ordered the National Guard to come to the building.
Although Pence is unlikely to attend the hearings, some of his top advisers are. Greg Jacob, Pence’s former chief adviser, Mark Short, his former chief of staff, and conservative lawyer J.W. Michael Lutig, who advised Pence before Jan. 6, is likely to testify in the coming weeks.
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