January 6 Public Hearings

When are the hearings’ dates and times?

The first hearing will start Thursday, June 9, at 8 p.m. Eastern. The committee hasn’t announced a formal schedule for the rest, but there could be as many as eight through June, with a final hearing in September — right before the November midterm elections.

How to watch the hearings

The committee usually live-streams its hearings, and most major TV news stations will be airing at least Thursday’s hours-long hearings in full: TheWrap reports that ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC and CNN plan to. Fox News is the only major news network to decide not to, instead saying it will continue with its regular, primetime coverage and talk about the hearings “as warranted.”

The Washington Post will have anchored coverage and analysis beginning Thursday night on www.washingtonpost.com.

What to watch for

The committee plans to detail their findings of what they say was a months-long Republican conspiracy to overthrow Joe Biden’s legitimate election victory, led by President Donald Trump. The committee could even accuse Trump of committing a crime by intentionally trying to stop Congress’s certification of Biden’s win on Jan. 6, 2021. But Congress’s power is limited; ultimately, the Justice Department would have to decide whether to prosecute.

Investigators have not gotten many close Trump allies or top Republican members of Congress to testify. So they plan to call in staffers to some of the top players, like aides to former vice president Mike Pence, or former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. And they plan to play videos of their previous interviews with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, report The Post’s Jacqueline Alemany, Josh Dawsey and Amy Gardner.

Each hearing will have a theme. On Thursday, lawmakers are planning to introduce the public to what they’ve been up to for the past 11 months since Democrats in Congress voted to set up the investigatory committee. Only two Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) sit on it, and there are no Trump allies on the committee. They will make an opening statement that offers an overview of the Jan. 6 events.

The New York Times reports that on Thursday, a documentarian who interviewed the Proud Boys and a Capitol police officer who was injured in the attack will provide testimony as some of the panel’s first public witnesses. This comes after the current and former leaders of the Proud Boys were charged with seditious conspiracy, for allegedly planning the attack on the Capitol.

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When the hearings go live it will be streaming at the following:

Fox News instead has already ramped up its midterms seasonal coverage of "migrant caravans" that will be broadcast as counterprogramming beginning now through the rest of the year, ending abruptly after election day (again).

Rep. Elise Stefanik teased additional efforts to counterprogram the hearings will proceed as well.

McCarthy and Jordan were among those subpoenaed by the January 6 committee who refused to cooperate. Jim Jordan particularly demanded that the committee disclose all of their sensitive investigative info for him before he would cooperate - something totally innocent people do all the time. He has told multiple versions in public of what happened on January 6, including different versions of whether or not he spoke to POTUS on January 6, or what time on January 6, or what about.

Stefanik called the committee "unconstitutional" but it remains unclear how this applies to the January 6 select committee, and not previous select Committees on eg. Benghazi, or Emailgate. Republicans rejected an earlier proposal to have an even more even-handed panel that would have been Bicameral; they filibustered the vote to make this happen. Proceeding that effort, Republicans outed Liz Cheney as the GOP House leader for her cooperation with Nancy Pelosi in devising a January 6 select subcommittee. Kevin McCarthy (who refused to cooperate as a witness) tried to recommend Jim Jordan and other Republicans to the panel that had actively voted to object to electors or had even sponsored lawsuits against the results (the least impartial investigators).

What remains clear is that Republicans have been found and evidenced to have coordinated in very real terms a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the legitimate election results of the 2020 presidential race - all 3rd party ninja audits, lawsuits etc. all exhausted, there was no There there, and Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO, may die mad about it. But, this went from not just mere challenging of votes or recounts but extended to having the GOP coordinate on a national level to send falsified slates of electors to congress (fraud, charges of which are working their way through the legal system right now) to which then VP Pence was to be encouraged to use as 'reasoning' to suspend the Electoral Count, which is outlined in the constitution and codified as 3 USC § 15. It included members of Trump's administration and shadow-administration (members who worked for Trump but were not federal employees or cabinet members, such as Rudy Giuliani and Roger Stone) meeting with militia groups in DC in the days prior to the autocoup attempt; it also included the likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene providing extraordinary tours to individuals on January 5th of the capital, during Covid. It even appears to at least extend so far as encouraging threats against Mike Pence to 'keep him in line.' At its core, the strategy was known as the Green Bay Sweep, and Navarro has basically told the public everything there is to know about the sweep, even though he says he can't tell it to the committee, or comply with their subpoena, because it is "executive privilege" (it's not privileged if you already disclosed it on Fox News, and if it was executive privilege, it is current POTUS's right to assert or waive that privilege, not any former POTUS over any sensitive issue). And more! This included pressuring Republican Secretaries of State to just find or come up with a convenient number of new votes for Trump, and even today includes trying to oust those in office who refused to cooperate with such pressure. Prosecuting documents for the Proud Boys indicate they dressed in black to be 'incognito' (possibly to appear to be Antifa) and they arranged to approach the Capitol building in the days leading up to the event, in a scattered way so as not to reveal their coordination.

At his morning rally, Trump said publicly to Pence, "Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country."

Shortly thereafter and before being gaveled in, Pence relayed the following, essentially that MAGA's interpretation of the law was wrong, that the VP does not have any power to consider fraudulent slates of electors:

This tweet didn't take long to be TLDR'd by the crowd, and they became angry and started breaching the capital fences, about 5 mins before Pelosi gaveled the session into order. As things continued to devolve outside, Pence proceeded inside, Senator Ted Cruz sponsored an objection by a House member and the ECA proceeded as proscribed. At least until it became clear the building proceeded to being smashed into, which is when Pence was whisked away by the Secret Service and the session was suspended.

"Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution," Trump tweeted not long after it became clear that chaos had ensued. From there, aides report Trump expressed empathy with calls to "Hang Mike Pence," and it took him the bulk of several hours to come up with a public address to 'lead' the crowd to resume calm and order, a video address which reportedly had to be reshot in multiple takes, as POTUS kept forgetting to ask the rioters to remain peaceful or leave. One rioter tried to charge at an armed officer through a broken glass panel on a locked door and was killed at the scene, at least one officer protecting the Capitol later died from his injuries and 4 other officers iirc took their own lives. Hundreds have been arrested for their actions that day, ranging from simple trespassing, theft, vandalism, obstructing an official proceeding to organized charges of seditious conspiracy (ie. your criminal charge for 'insurrection')

Following most of the days events, the Congress finally resumed late into the evening, in a tattered room, and many GOP lawmakers expressed they were "done" with Donald Trump, "Count me out" Lindsay Graham said. But in the aftermath of January 6 it apparently became clear to them that Trump still had a lot of diehard populist support, and one by one they've all come back to him, or they've been browbeat into resigning. Now prepared to offer us their counterprogramming and excuses for why January 6 isn't a big deal, or why we need to be focused on such and such distraction but not this attempt by one political establishment over the other to autocoup the effective end of the US Republic system.