WASHINGTON – Seventeen months after a mob of Donald J. supporters. Trump invades Capitol with false allegations of stolen election, House Democrats plan to use iconic set of investigative hearings starting this week to try to divert January 6 voters’ attention to tie Republicans directly to an unprecedented to undermine democracy itself.
As their control of Congress hangs in the balance, Democrats plan to use television-created moments and carefully choreographed the revelations in six hearings to remind the public of the scale of Mr Trump’s efforts to cancel the election. and to convince voters that the upcoming by-elections are a chance for Republicans to be held accountable.
This is a difficult battle at a time when polls show voters’ attention is focused elsewhere, including on inflation, rising coronavirus cases and record high gas prices. But Democrats say the hearings will give them a platform to put forward a broader argument as to why they deserve to stay in power.
“When these hearings are over, voters will realize how irresponsibly Republicans have been in their attempts to cast their vote and how far Republicans will go to gain power for themselves,” said Sean Patrick Maloney, a Democrat campaign chair.
The elected commission investigating the attack, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, says it has approached its work in a sober, apolitical way and will present its findings as such. But it is clear that the hearings, which will take place five months before the midterm elections, in which Democrats are preparing for heavy losses, carry high political stakes.
The hope among Democrats is that the commission’s findings, gathered from 1,000 witnesses and more than 140,000 documents, will do most of the work on communications instead. Representative Jamie Ruskin, a Democrat from Maryland and a member of the committee, promised that the hearings “will blow up the roof of the House.”
They have retained an experienced television chief executive to ensure this happens, and have organized dozens of viewing parties across the country in hopes of sparking interest. But they face an attack by Republicans who tend to deny, downplay and obscure the truth about what happened in their own communications operation aimed at discrediting the investigation.
And Democrats oppose the reality that harsh emotions have faded since the attack, even among voters who are interested in the facts, as attention has shifted to the ongoing war in Ukraine, domestic violence and deep pessimism about the state of the economy.
Their task is to convince voters that the January 6 attack revealed bigger and more important issues at stake, including the Republican Party’s coordination with violent extremists and its decision to stick to the “big lie” that the 2020 election were stolen as a membership test.
Representative Hakim Jeffries, a New York Democrat, said on Twitter that the hearings “will fully reveal the cult’s extreme efforts to overthrow the US government.”
Much of Thursday’s first hearing will focus on the Proud Boys, a far-right group whose members have been accused of plotting to storm the Capitol, according to two people familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
It is expected to include testimony from documentary filmmaker Nick Custed, who joined the group during the storming of the building, and Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who was injured in an attack allegedly caused by Proud Boys.
The aim is to provide the public with a more in-depth portrait of what happened on January 6 than the images broadcast on television that day, and to reveal the extent of what the panel called a “coordinated, multi-stage effort to reverse the results.” from the 2020 presidential election and preventing the transfer of power. “
Norman L. Eisen, who was hired by the Judicial Commission to serve as special adviser during Trump’s first impeachment, said Democrats have learned from some of their successes and failures during those hearings, but still face challenges.
“They have to have three things: the eye-catching power of the new evidence, the spontaneous drama created by living witnesses, and the oldest trick in the book: telling a good story,” Eisen said. “The risk is that there is a huge amount of anticipation and accumulation.”
However, some Democrat operatives believe the political gain could be significant, both in boosting the party’s main supporters and in attracting independent voters who can turn against Republicans based on what they see and they hear.
Anat Schenker-Osorio, founder of ASO Communications, a progressive political consulting firm, conducts focus groups with voters. She said both democratic “base voters” and “changing voters” were motivated by increased attention to the Capitol uprising.
“Jan. “6 is very noticeable and very negative for these potential voters in the interim term,” Ms. Schenker-Osorio told activists during a recent call to promote the hearings.
Democrats met with prime-time live hearings networks and scheduled more than 90 events for viewing in various states, including a “flagship” event at the Robert A. Taft Memorial and Carion in Washington, D.C. will receive free ice cream.
“It’s everything from a family-type event in the living room to organizing it in a union hall to holding it on a big field with Jumbotron,” said Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the progressive group Public Citizen.
In an effort to prevent the hearing from becoming too dry and unrelated to the internal reality of the attack, the commission plans to release a video of the Capitol attack in advance and is considering broadcasting videos with key testimonies from high-ranking witnesses, such as White House Councilors Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
In an attempt to provide the equivalent of the Watergate hearings for the streaming era, the commission recruited former ABC News president James Goldston, a move previously announced by Axios to help record the hearings in six close episodes between 90 minutes and 2.5 hours.
Republican lawmakers have already begun to impose a counter-narrative to reject the hearings as nothing more than political theater at a time when Americans are more concerned about kitchen problems such as rising gas prices and a shortage of baby formula.
“Instead of focusing on $ 5 gas, 6,000 illegal immigrants a day, recording deaths from fentanyl or violent criminals terrorizing American Democrats, use taxpayers’ money as a TV producer for circus political commercials on Jan. 6,” the senator said. Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida, said on Twitter on Monday.
Representative Elise Stefanick of New York, Republican No. 3, who was Mr. Trump’s main advocate during the first impeachment hearing, will oversee efforts to discredit the commission’s findings, in coordination with Kevin McCarthy, California’s leader Kevin McCarthy. , and Jim Jordan of Ohio, the best Republican on the Judiciary Committee. They plan to lure Republican lawmakers on television to make a disproved claim that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is to blame for the attack.
The commission has not yet compiled the full list of witnesses and is still discussing the possibility of public testimony with several high-ranking Trump-era officials.
The court expects Jeffrey A. Rosen, a former acting attorney general, and Richard P. Donohue, a former deputy attorney general, to respond to official requests for testimony, according to two people informed.
Both Mr Rosen and Mr Donohue have already told a number of congressional committees that Mr Trump and his allies have pressured the department to lie falsely that it has detected voter fraud and to use its power to overturn the results. .
The commission is still in informal talks with Pat A. Chipolon, a former White House adviser, and with Bung J. Again, the former US prosecutor in Atlanta, who abruptly resigned on January 4, 2021, after learning that Mr. Trump had planned to fire him because he did not detect electoral fraud, say those familiar with the discussions.
Katie Banner contributed to the report.
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