The January 6 committee was originally expected to hold another hearing on Thursday detailing Donald Trump’s response to the insurrection as it unfolded.
But a committee aide said yesterday that the panel would hold only one hearing this week, and members are instead expected to reconvene next week.
The aide said the delay was meant to give committee members an opportunity to review “new and important information” that has been received “on a daily basis” as the hearings unfold.
But the committee has not provided any further details about the next hearing, which could be the panel’s last hearing for the time being.
Donald Trump’s former top strategist, Steve Bannon, suffered heavy setbacks in his contempt of Congress case on Monday after a federal judge dismissed his motion to delay his trial, scheduled for next week, and ruled he could not make two of his principal defences to a jury.
The flurry of adverse rulings from District of Columbia district judge Carl Nichols – a Trump appointee – marked a significant knock back for Bannon, who was charged with criminal contempt after he ignored a subpoena last year from the House January 6 select committee investigating the attack on the US Capitol by extremist Trump supporters in 2021.
Nichols refused in federal court in Washington DC, to delay Bannon’s trial date set for next Monday, saying that he saw no reason to push back proceedings after he severely limited the defences that the former Trump aide’s lawyers could present to a jury.
The defeats for Bannon stunned his lead lawyer, David Schoen, who asked, aghast: “What’s the point of going to trial if we don’t have any defences?”
Read the Guardian’s full report:
Today’s January 6 hearing is expected to feature clips from the select committee’s interview last week with Pat Cipollone, who served as Donald Trump’s White House counsel.
Cipollone met with investigators behind closed doors for more than eight hours on Friday, after he was subpoenaed by the committee last month.
Jamie Raskin, who will co-lead today’s hearing with Stephanie Murphy, said Cipollone corroborated key elements of the testimony already heard by the committee. That includes the testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
“Cipollone has corroborated almost everything that we’ve learned from the prior hearings,” Raskin told NBC News today. “I certainly did not hear him contradict Cassidy Hutchinson. … He had the opportunity to say whatever he wanted to say, so I didn’t see any contradiction there.”
Hutchinson’s explosive testimony at a committee hearing last month included detailed descriptions of Trump’s outrage on January 6 and in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack, as he peddled lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
According to Hutchinson, Trump was informed that some of his supporters were carrying weapons on January 6 and still told them to march to the Capitol, as lawmakers met to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the election.
Hutchinson said that Trump planned to go to the Capitol with his supporters and tried to grab for the steering wheel of his car when his team told him that he would instead return to the White House after his speech on January 6.
An aide to the January 6 committee said the members would focus on a meeting held on 18 December 2020, with Donald Trump and members of his legal team, including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
At that point, there was a growing schism within Trump’s inner circle between those who believed it was time for the president to accept his electoral defeat and those who pushed even more radical actions such as seizing voting machines or appointing a special counsel to investigate the election.
Hours after the meeting, Trump sent a tweet that Murphy perceived as a “siren call” to militia groups that 6 January 2021 would be the “last stand” in a sprawling effort to overturn the results of an election he lost.
“Big protest in DC on January 6th,” Trump wrote in that December tweet. “Be there, will be wild!”
The tweet was a “pivotal moment that spurred a change of events including a pre-planning by the Proud Boys”, the aide said.
Greetings from Washington, live blog readers.
The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol will hold its next public hearing this afternoon.
The panel will examine Donald Trump’s links to far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, whose members participated in the January 6 insurrection.
Committee members have said the hearing will particularly focus on Trump’s 19 December tweet urging his supporters to come to Washington for a “wild” event on 6 January, the day that Congress was scheduled to certify Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.
Committee member Stephanie Murphy, who will lead today’s hearing alongside Jamie Raskin, said Sunday that Trump’s tweet served as a “siren call” to far-right extremists.
“People will hear the story of that tweet and then the explosive effects it had in Trump world and specifically among the domestic violence extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country at that point,” Raskin said on Sunday.
The hearing will get under way at 1pm ET, so stay tuned.
Here’s what else is happening today:
- The Senate judiciary committee is holding a hearing on the end of Roe. The lieutenant governor of Illinois, Juliana Stratton, will testify alongside four other witnesses.
- Biden is meeting with the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The two leaders will discuss “their visions for North America and their efforts to address global challenges such as food security, continued cooperation on migration, and joint development efforts”, per the White House.
- The White House will host the Congressional Picnic this afternoon. After the picnic, Biden will fly from Washington to Jerusalem.
The blog will have more updates and analysis coming up.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
