The House of Representatives select committee investigating the US Capitol attack is to unveil new evidence at public hearings next week showing former US president Donald Trump and top aides acted with corrupt intent to stop then-US president-elect Joe Biden’s certification, according to sources close to the inquiry.
The panel intends to use the hearings as its principal method of revealing potential crimes by Trump as he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, the sources said, in what could be a treacherous legal and political moment for the former president.
As the US Department of Justice mounts parallel investigations into the Capitol attack, the select committee is hoping that the previously unseen evidence will leave an indelible mark on the US public about the extent to which Trump went in trying to return himself to the Oval Office.
Photo: AFP
“They’re important for setting a record for posterity, but they’re also important for jolting the American public into realizing what a direct threat we had coming from the highest levels of government to illegitimately install a president who lost,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and emeritus scholar at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, said of the hearings.
The panel’s ambitions for the hearings are twofold, the sources said: presenting the basis for alleging Trump broke the law and placing the Capitol attack in a broader context of efforts to overturn the election, with the former president’s involvement as the central thread.
At their heart, the hearings are about distilling thousands of communications between top Trump White House aides and operatives outside the administration and the Trump campaign into a compelling narrative about the events of Jan. 6, the sources said.
To tell that story, the sources said, the select committee intends to have its senior investigative counsels reveal previously secret White House records, photographs and videos that are to be presented, in real time, to starkly illustrate the live witness testimony.
On Thursday night, at the inaugural hearing at 8pm, the panel’s chairman Bennie Thompson and vice chair Liz Cheney are likely to make opening arguments, outline a road map for the hearings, and give an overview of the events of Jan. 6 and the preceding weeks.
The panel is likely to focus on broad themes for the following four hearings, such as how Trump used false claims of voter fraud to undermine the 2020 election and future races, and how he tried to use fake electors to deceive US Congress into returning him to office.
House investigators are also likely to focus on how Trump directly pivoted to the Jan. 6 congressional certification — and not the December deadlines for states to certify their electors — as an inflection point, and how his actions led straight to militia and far-right groups’ covert maneuverings.
The panel is then likely to reserve its most explosive revelations for the final hearing, when select committee members Adam Kinzinger and Elaine Luria are expected to run through Trump’s actions and inactions as the Jan. 6 attack unfolded.
The list of witnesses has not been finalized, the sources said, but it is expected to include top aides to former US vice president Mike Pence, aides to Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and people with direct knowledge of militia group activities on Jan. 6.
From a legal perspective, the panel has already alleged in court filings that Trump and his external legal adviser, John Eastman, contravened multiple federal laws to overturn the 2020 election outcome, including obstruction of US Congress and defrauding the US.
The select committee hopes that by revealing new evidence in hearings, the sources said, it can convince beyond a reasonable doubt the US public and potentially the justice department that the former president broke laws to reverse his 2020 election defeat.
Among the highlights of the already-public evidence include the revelation that Eastman admitted to Pence’s counsel, Greg Jacob, that his scheme to obstruct US Congress on Jan. 6 was unlawful, but pressed ahead with it anyway.
The internal White House schedule for Jan. 6 that the select committee obtained through the National Archives showed that Trump would have known he had no plans to march with the crowd to the Capitol when he falsely promised that at the Ellipse rally.
House investigators are in many ways making their case to the US public, the sources said, since it is not certain whether the panel would make criminal referrals to federal prosecutors, given they are not binding on the justice department, which has the sole authority to file charges.
However, that quest will come with its own challenges, and the panel’s greatest difficulty is perhaps not so much whether they can show wrongdoing by Trump and his top advisers, but whether it can get Republican and independent voters to care.
The former president’s most ardent defenders in Congress and top Republicans led by the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy are planning aggressive counterprogramming to the public hearings that slam the panel as partisan, Republican aides said.
The Republican National Committee has also circulated a one-page memo of talking points, Vox earlier reported, requesting that Trump surrogates attack the investigation as “rigged” — even though multiple federal courts have ruled the inquiry is fully legitimate.
“I don’t have any expectation that Republicans who believe the election was stolen will change their minds, but it’s about the other voters and whether it will jolt the Democratic base into understanding what the stakes are,” Ornstein said.
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