The House Special Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol will hold another public hearing on Tuesday, this time focusing on the role of extremists that day.
Committee member Congressman Jamie Raskin said Sunday on “Face the Nation” that the upcoming hearing will “continue the story of Donald Trump’s attempt to derail the 2020 presidential election.”
CBS News will air the hearing as a special report beginning at 1:00 PM ET.
Raskin noted Sunday that the committee has so far outlined former President Trump’s campaigns to pressure the vice president, the Justice Department, state lawmakers and local election officials ahead of Congress’ planned Jan. 6 certification of the Electoral College. Documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was embedded with the Proud Boys on January 6, provided footage from his film to the commission, some of which was shown at the first public hearing on June 9.
“One of the things people will learn is the fundamental importance of the meeting that took place at the White House” on Dec. 18, Raskin said.
A video of former President Donald Trump plays as Cassidy Hutchinson, former top aide to Trump, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, testifies during the sixth House hearing investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol with a cannon Office Building on June 28, 2022 in Washington, DC. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“And that day, the group of outside lawyers called ‘Team Crazy’ by people in and around the White House came to try to push for several new courses of action, including confiscating voting machines across the country,” Raskin said. . “So some of the people involved in that were Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani was around for some of that discussion, Michael Flynn was around for that. But against that ‘Team Crazy’ was an in-house group of lawyers who basically wanted the president at this point to admit he lost the election, and they’re much more willing to accept the reality of their defeat at this point.”
Raskin said that in the middle of the night on Dec. 19, Trump sent a tweet “after a crazy meeting that has been described as the craziest meeting of the entire Trump presidency.”
“Donald Trump sent a tweet that would be heard around the world, marking the first time in American history that a president of the United States has called a protest against his own government, essentially to try to stop the counting of electoral college votes in a presidential election. an election that he had lost,” Raskin said. “Absolutely unprecedented, nothing like this has ever happened before. So people will hear the story of that tweet and then the explosive effect it had in the Trump world and in particular among local violent extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the world state.”
Last week, Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified before the committee for more than eight hours. Raskin said Cipollone provided “valuable” information to the committee.
“We’ll be using a lot of Mr. Cipollone’s testimony to corroborate other things we’ve learned along the way,” Raskin said. “He was a White House adviser at the time. He was aware of every major move that I believe Donald Trump was making to try to throw off the 2020 election and essentially seize the presidency.”
The Jan. 6 House committee held seven public hearings in June and July to present the evidence gathered during the 11-month investigation. The commission has heard hundreds of hours of testimony, including from some of Trump’s key inner circle.
In addition to the information about the lobbying campaigns, the commission also revealed new details about a scheme allegedly proposed by Trump allies to field fake voters from several battleground states that President Joe Biden won.
On June 28, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, gave public testimony in a hastily added hearing. Her hit testimony included that Trump was told the crowd at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 had guns and other weapons and that the former president wanted to join them on the road to the Capitol. She also said she was told that Trump lunged at a Secret Service agent in a presidential car.
Hutchinson also testified that Meadows told her in the days leading up to January 6th that “There’s a lot going on with Cass, but I don’t know, things could get really, really bad on January 6th.”
This weekend, lawyers for Trump campaign strategist Steve Bannon, who has been indicted by the Justice Department for refusing to comply with a subpoena for testimony, sent a letter to the committee saying he is willing to testify publicly.
Bannon invoked executive privilege in refusing to testify, but Trump sent a letter to Bannon’s lawyers waiving executive privilege. Mr. Biden rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege, and that was upheld by the Supreme Court.
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