Storming of the US Capitol (Jan, 2021)
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Jan. 6 Was a ‘War Scene,’ and Trump Was the Director
There is every reason to be skeptical, even cynical, about the effect and impact of the Jan. 6 hearings on the political landscape.For one thing, most of the details of what happened are already in the public record. We already know that Donald Trump and his allies were engaged in a conspiracy to subvert the 2020 presidential election and overturn the constitutional order. We already know that one of their plans was to derail certification of the election by Congress and use the resulting confusion to certify fraudulent electors for Trump instead. We already know that the “stop the steal” rally on the ellipse across from the White House was organized to put pressure on both Republican lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to follow through and “do the right thing,” as Trump put it.We have the memos and emails and text messages from Trump’s allies in and outside of Congress, each person trying to do as much as possible to help the former president realize his autocratic dreams. We know that Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee corresponded with the White House, pledging their support and assistance for the president’s efforts to contest the election. We know that John Eastman, a prominent member of the conservative legal establishment, wrote detailed guidance for Trump and his team, giving step-by-step instructions on how Pence could abuse the process to keep Joe Biden from ever taking office.We already know about — we already saw with our own eyes — the assault on the Capitol, the threats against the vice president and the heroism of the Capitol Police. And we know, or at least some of us know, that Jan. 6 was just the beginning and that Trump has continued to use all the power and influence at his disposal to put pro-coup Republicans on the ballot in as many states as possible. The insurrection may be over, but the plot to steal the presidency is intact.If all of this is already in the public record — if all of it is already part of our public knowledge — why bother with hearings?The right answer, I think, is spectacle.Most political theater is tedious and partisan. Cheap meat for a hungry base. But there are times when these theatrics can serve a real purpose for the public at large.In an article in the Fordham Law Review, Josh Chafetz — a law professor at Georgetown — makes a novel distinction between traditional congressional oversight and what he terms congressional “overspeech.”Oversight is (or at least is supposed to be) about good-faith fact-finding for the sake of public accountability — a central part of Congress’s role as it has developed over time. In this view, Chafetz writes, oversight hearings should be “primarily receptive in nature,” aimed at “drawing out new facts or at least new implications of old facts.”Overspeech, by contrast, is the “use of the tools of oversight” for performance, spectacle and theatricality. Overspeech is used to communicate directly to the public, to make an argument and to shape its views. It is a form of mass politics, in which “overspeakers” tailor their approach “to the media environment in which they operate” and “shape their behavior as to increase the likelihood of favorable coverage.”If oversight is meant to be the bloodless investigation of facts, then overspeech, Chafetz writes, is defined by its “performative elements, ranging from casting to scripting, from scenery to costuming, all of it aimed at more effectively communicating a public message.”Because it is often partisan, overspeech is also intentionally and deliberately divisive. And while this might seem to put it in conflict with the goal of public persuasion, Chafetz argues that the reality isn’t so simple. “In October 1973, the first votes in the House Judiciary Committee on matters related to impeachment were strong party-line votes,” he writes. “Nine months later, six of the committee’s seventeen Republicans voted for the first article of impeachment.” What started as a partisan issue, he continues, “became something else over time.”The Jan. 6 hearings should be about more than the facts of the investigation. They should be about the performance of those facts. The hearings, in short, should be a show, aimed directly at the casual viewer who might be too preoccupied with the price of gas or food to pay attention to an ordinary congressional hearing. And Democrats inclined to make them “bipartisan” or evenhanded should reject the temptation; it might do more good — it might be more effective — if this spectacle is full of rancor and fireworks.Spectacle is what we need, and judging from the first night of televised hearings on Thursday, spectacle is what we’re going to get. The members of the committee were direct and sharp-tongued — “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone,” Representative Liz Cheney said to her Republican colleagues during her opening statement, “but your dishonor will remain” — and they did not shy away from the chaos, disorder and excruciating violence of the insurrection.At one point, a police officer who was injured at the Capitol, Caroline Edwards, testified to seeing “officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”“I can remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was just a war scene,” she said. “It was something like I had seen out of the movies.”There is a larger point to make here as well. For the past year, Democrats have struggled to break through to the public; they have struggled to sell their accomplishments, such as they are. The Biden administration, in particular, has made a conscious decision to stick to so-called kitchen table or pocketbook issues and let its actions speak for themselves. But passivity of this sort does nothing but cede the field to one’s opponents.Because they promise to be an event, the Jan. 6 hearings give Biden a chance to take another approach: to fan emotion and use conflict, not conciliation, to make his case. There are no guarantees of success, but at the very least, both he and the Democratic Party have a chance to seize the initiative. They should take it.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More
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5 Takeaways From the First Jan. 6 Hearing
The opening House hearing into the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol was a compact and controlled two hours, designed as an overview of what was described as a methodical conspiracy, led and coordinated by President Donald J. Trump, to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and democracy itself.It was also an enticement to the American people to watch the next five scheduled hearings.Here are some takeaways:Trump was at the center of the plot.The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, began laying out what they described as an elaborate, intentional scheme by Mr. Trump to remain in power, one unprecedented in American history and with dangerous implications for democracy.“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” Mr. Thompson said.Both leaders had blistering words for Mr. Trump and about the threat he poses to American democracy. They made it clear that, for all his ongoing bluster about stolen elections, Mr. Trump had knowingly spread claims about election fraud that people closest to him knew were false, tried to use the apparatus of government and the courts to cling to power, and then when all of that failed, sat back approvingly in the White House as a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol threatening to hang his vice president.Key figures around Trump never believed his lie of a stolen election.The hearing used the videotaped testimony of some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides and allies to show that the Trump campaign and his White House — and perhaps the president himself — had known well that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 election. It showed how Mr. Trump and his loyalists had used a calculated campaign of lies to bind his followers and build support for his attempt to stay in power, through extralegal means and violence.The committee played excerpts from videotaped interviews of former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said he had told Mr. Trump that the talk of widespread fraud in the 2020 election was “bullshit.” There was a clip of his daughter Ivanka Trump saying that she accepted Mr. Barr’s conclusions and of a campaign lawyer, Alex Cannon, who told Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, that Trump allies had found no election issues that could reverse the results in key states. “So there’s no there there?” Mr. Meadows responded, according to Mr. Cannon’s account.Read More on the Jan. 6 House Committee HearingsThe Meaning of the Hearings: While the public sessions aren’t going to unite the country, they could significantly affect public opinion.An Unsettling Narrative: During the first hearing, the House panel presented a gripping story with a sprawling cast of characters, but only three main players: Donald Trump, the Proud Boys and a Capitol Police officer.Trump’s Depiction: Former president Donald J. Trump was portrayed as a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump: In videos shown during the hearing, Mr.Trump’s daughter and son-in-law were stripped of their carefully managed images.At one point, in one of the most potentially damaging moments of the videotaped interviews, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is shown dismissing the threats of Pat A. Cipollone, then the White House counsel, to resign in the face of Mr. Trump’s machinations as “whining.”A Capitol Police officer who battled the rioters humanized the drama.Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer who is believed to have been the first injured during the riot, testified in chilling detail about the first breach of police lines, in which she was crushed beneath bike racks that were pushed on her and a handful of other officers who had no chance to hold back the mob.“The back of my head clipped the concrete stairs behind me,” she testified, recounting the moment before she lost consciousness. Her testimony of continuing to fight off the rioters in efforts to protect the Capitol provided a striking contrast with the committee’s account of Mr. Trump sitting in the White House watching with apparent sympathy as the mob ransacked the building, yelling at aides who implored him to call off the violence and saying at one point, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.”Once she came to and beheld the scene from behind police lines, Officer Edwards said, her breath was taken away. She slipped in blood, saw fellow officers writhing in pain and suffering from bear spray and tear gas, and gazed out on what she described as a war scene unfolding outside the Capitol.“It was carnage,” she said. “It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw.”The Proud Boys mounted an organized effort.One of the witnesses, a British documentary filmmaker named Nick Quested who was embedded with the extremist Proud Boys, gave testimony that indicated that group’s leadership had conspired with another extremist organization, the Oath Keepers, well ahead of the riot to plan an attack that would breach the Capitol.Mr. Quested showed footage he had shot of the Proud Boys leader, Enrique Tarrio, meeting clandestinely with Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers on Jan. 5, and he told of the group breaking away from a morning rally behind the White House on Jan. 6 to scout police defenses around the Capitol.“I am not allowed to say what is going to happen today because everyone’s just going to have to watch,” one woman said on video on the morning of Jan. 6, when no hint of an attack was evident.There is more to come on the role of Trump and RepublicansThe hearing concluded with a hint of what was to come in the next hearings, which committee members hope will show how Mr. Trump was personally responsible for the worst attack on the Capitol since the British ransacked it in 1814 and that he remains a threat to the American democratic experiment.The committee concluded with videos of the rioters themselves saying they believed they were invited to Washington that day by their president, who had asked them to fight for him.“He lit the fuse that ultimately resulted in the violence of Jan. 6,” Mr. Thompson, the committee’s chairman, said of Mr. Trump.Ms. Cheney, whose insistence on condemning Mr. Trump and participation in the investigation have rendered her a pariah in her own party, said the case the panel would make would taint Republicans indelibly.“Tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,” she said. “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.” More
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Why the Jan. 6 Hearings Matter
Even if the Jan. 6 attack will not become a unifying moment for the country.The opportunity for the Jan. 6 attack to serve as a unifying moment for the country has already been lost.The initial bipartisan condemnation of it has given way to a partisan argument in which many congressional Republicans play down the attack. The Republican Party’s official organization described the riot as “legitimate political discourse,” and Republican leaders like Representative Kevin McCarthy quickly softened their initial denunciation. About half of Republicans voters say it was a patriotic attempt to defend freedom.But the facts about Jan. 6 still matter. On that day, a mob violently attacked the Capitol — smashing windows, punching police officers, threatening members of Congress and Vice President Mike Pence — to try to prevent the certification of a presidential election. The rioters justified their attack with lies about voter fraud, and they received encouragement from top Republicans, including President Donald Trump and the wife of a Supreme Court justice.Last night, a House committee investigating the attack held its first public hearing, and today’s newsletter covers the highlights. These hearings are not going to transform the politics of Jan. 6, yet they do have the potential to affect public opinion on the margins. And the margins can matter.Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer, and Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesThere are still many Republican voters disgusted by what happened on Jan. 6. Nearly half say that finding out what happened that day is important. Almost 20 percent consider the attack to have been an attempt to overthrow the government, according to a recent CBS News poll. About 40 percent believe, accurately, that voter fraud was not widespread in the 2020 election.“I actually think that there is an opportunity,” Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, said this week on our colleague Kara Swisher’s podcast. The hearings, Longwell added, can help prosecute the case for how extreme some Republican politicians have become.If Republican voters are divided over the attack and Democrats are almost uniformly horrified by it, the politicians making excuses for it remain in the minority. Candidates who base their campaigns on lies about voter fraud — as some are now doing in Arizona, Pennsylvania and elsewhere — will have a harder time winning elections. Future efforts to overturn an election will be less likely to succeed.For the same reason, any Republicans who have consistently denounced the attacks — like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the only two Republicans serving on the Jan. 6 committee — are especially important. They are demonstrating that it’s possible to hold very conservative views and nonetheless believe in honoring election results. Until very recently, that combination wasn’t even unusual: Ronald Reagan and many other Republicans won elections by earning more votes.The Jan. 6 hearings are part of a larger struggle over the future of American democracy. Americans will probably never come to a consensus on many polarizing political issues, like abortion, guns, immigration and religion. That’s part of living in a democracy.But if Americans cannot agree that the legitimate winner of an election should take office and if losing candidates refuse to participate in a peaceful transfer of power, the country has much bigger problems than any policy disagreement.Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the committee’s vice chairwoman.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe hearing:The committee, led by Cheney and Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, cast the Capitol attack as part of Trump’s “sprawling, multi-step conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election. “Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” Thompson said.Lawmakers interspersed their presentation with videos of former Trump aides testifying that they had told the president that his claims of voter fraud were false. The committee also played never-before-aired footage of rioters attacking police officers.Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer whom the mob knocked unconscious and pepper sprayed, testified in person about the attack: “It was carnage. It was chaos.”Cheney addressed members of her party who remain loyal to Trump: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”What we learned:Trump believed the rioters were “doing what they should be doing,” Cheney said, and yelled at advisers who said that he should call them off. He said that rioters who chanted about hanging Pence “maybe” had “the right idea.”The committee played video of Bill Barr, the former attorney general, saying that he had called Trump’s fraud claims “bullshit” and “crazy stuff.” Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, testified that she “accepted” what Barr said.Footage shot by a documentary filmmaker showed members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two far-right groups who stormed the Capitol, meeting on the evening before the attack.In video testimonies, several rioters said that they had stormed the Capitol in response to Trump’s summons. “He asked me for my vote and he asked me to come on Jan. 6,” one said.Cheney said that Pence, not Trump, ordered the National Guard to the Capitol during the attack, and that “multiple” House Republicans sought pardons over their efforts to overturn the election.Related:The hearing depicted Trump as “not just a rogue president but a would-be autocrat,” The Times’s Peter Baker writes.On Fox News, which did not broadcast the hearing live, Tucker Carlson called the attack “forgettably minor.”The F.B.I. arrested Ryan Kelley, a Republican candidate for Michigan governor, on charges stemming from Jan. 6.At least 21 Republican legislators joined the crowds in Washington on Jan. 6. Here’s where they are now.A bipartisan group of senators is nearing a deal to update the Electoral Count Act. One provision would clarify that the vice president cannot overturn election results.THE LATEST NEWSWar in Ukraine“Dead cities” in eastern Ukraine, ravaged by Russian attacks, have become the latest focal points in the war.Marking the 350th anniversary of Peter the Great’s birth, President Vladimir Putin compared himself and the invasion of Ukraine to Russia’s first emperor and his conquering exploits.Ukraine’s military and its government called for more arms from the West.The VirusIlana Diener holding Hudson, her 3-year-old son, at a trial for the Moderna vaccine last year.Emma H. Tobin/Associated PressThe White House has made millions of Covid vaccine doses available in anticipation that children under 5 will be able to get shots next week.Mysteries linger about how Covid spread to people, according to a new report from the W.H.O. on the origins of the coronavirus.PoliticsThe U.S. sped up its deportations of Haitian migrants last month, expelling nearly 4,000.Many state abortion bans that would go into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned do not contain exceptions once widely supported by abortion opponents.Carl Paladino, a Republican House candidate from New York, apologized for calling Adolf Hitler “the kind of leader we need today” last year.The House voted to pass legislation allowing guns to be confiscated from people deemed by a federal court to be dangerous. It garnered only five Republican votes.Other Big StoriesDuring the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, more than a dozen students remained alive in barricaded classrooms while officers waited over an hour for protective gear.A white police officer in Grand Rapids, Mich., was charged with murder over the shooting of Patrick Lyoya, a Black man, in April.The Justice Department is investigating the Louisiana State Police over the fatal beating of a Black motorist.The truth is out there: NASA will fund a study into U.F.O.s.Iran has begun dismantling U.N. cameras intended to monitor its nuclear program.A Broadway theater will be renamed to honor Lena Horne, a renowned Black singer and activist.Oklahoma’s softball team won the Women’s College World Series for the second straight year.OpinionsShanghai’s Covid lockdown exposed the myth of China’s superiority, Connie Mei Pickart says.For conservative Christians, calling mass shooters “evil” has become an excuse to avoid passing new gun laws, Esau McCaulley argues.MORNING READSBrewing beer at the Neuzelle monastery in eastern Germany.Patrick Junker for The New York TimesBeer lovers: Germany is facing a shortage of bottles.A full office return: How about … never?Modern Love: Is it time to stop privileging romantic connections over all others?A Times classic: How to keep your muscles into old age.Advice from Wirecutter: Tips for organizing your garage.Lives Lived: Dmitry Kovtun was one of two men suspected of poisoning Alexander Litvinenko, a fellow former spy who had defected from Russia, with radioactive polonium in a London bar. Kovtun died at 56.ARTS AND IDEAS Apps have struggled to reproduce the kind of real-world serendipity that puts a book in a reader’s hand.Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesYour next great readIt seems impossible to replicate online the feeling of walking into a bookstore and discovering new books and authors. But some apps are trying.Several companies have tried to tackle the issue, with mixed results, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth Harris write in The Times. This week, the app Tertulia came out. It uses a mix of artificial intelligence and human curation to distill online chatter about books and point readers to the ones that might interest them.But it’s not easy. “I don’t think anyone has found a tool or an algorithm or an A.I. platform that does the job for you,” Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, which analyzes the book industry, told The Times.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJohnny Miller for The New York Times. Food Stylst: Laurie Ellen Pellicano.This strawberry cake is a lighter take on the French fraisier. (See how to make it.)What to Listen toThe latest episode of “Still Processing” explores how one highway divided a Philadelphia community.What to ReadThe filmmaker Werner Herzog is making a foray into fiction with “The Twilight World.”Late Night“Exactly what you thought, but worse than you could have imagined”: Hosts weighed in on the first Jan. 6 hearing.Take the News QuizHow well did you follow the headlines this week?Now Time to PlayThe pangrams from yesterday’s Spelling Bee were innovating and navigation. Here is today’s puzzle.Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Scrumptious (five letters).And here’s today’s Wordle. After, use our bot to get better.Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — DavidP.S. Kevin Quealy — a talented data journalist and friend of this newsletter — will be The Upshot’s next editor.Here’s today’s front page. “The Daily” is about Chesa Boudin’s recall in San Francisco. “Popcast” answers listener questions.Natasha Frost, Claire Moses, Tom Wright-Piersanti and Ashley Wu contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox. More
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Jared and Ivanka, Without the Power or the Masks
In stark videotaped interviews, Ivanka Trump accepted the notion that there had been no fraud in the 2020 election. Jared Kushner complained that a White House counsel had been “whining.”WASHINGTON — They were stripped of their White House backdrop, their power and their masks.In brief video clips, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared in the first of a half-dozen public hearings held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.First up was Ms. Trump. Speaking in a soft voice and seemingly aware that the video might be made public someday, she said she believed the words of the former attorney general, William P. Barr, who on Dec. 1, 2020, said that there was no widespread fraud impacting the election that had taken place three weeks earlier.“It affected my perspective,” Ms. Trump said quietly, peering into a camera for a recorded interview that did not take place in person. “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he said — was saying.”That was despite what her father, President Donald J. Trump, was claiming, and despite the fact that, according to several White House aides working alongside her, she did little to try to temper his false claims that he had won the 2020 election. She continued to travel with him as he vented his claims in public.Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.“Like I said,” said Mr. Kushner, who was rarely heard from in public during his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many” presidential pardons finished as possible. Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons process, prompting complaints from legal experts and some of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the hearing room after the video ended. “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”Mr. Kushner’s words enraged Mr. Cipollone’s former colleagues, many of whom traded messages as they complained to reporters and one another as the hearing went on that the former president’s son-in-law was “arrogant.”No two people had positioned themselves as prominently in Mr. Trump’s White House as his daughter and his son-in-law, who came on as official advisers despite anti-nepotism laws and warnings from other aides that hiring family members can be fraught. Over four years, the two tended carefully to their images.Aides feared getting on the wrong side of the couple, who lived in Washington’s expensive Kalorama neighborhood and hosted dinners for the city’s political elite.The videos made clear that both were aware that things were going awry within the White House. But according to more than a half-dozen former Trump advisers, although both have attempted to distance themselves from that period, neither made much of an effort to pull Mr. Trump away from his obsession with staying in power.Instead, they left that task to the paid staff, who in turn kept waiting for the family to intervene more aggressively. Shortly after Election Day, most aides tried to avoid the Oval Office, fearful of having to listen to Mr. Trump vent. They were also eager to avoid the worst- case scenario: a directive from Mr. Trump that might have been illegal, and could have ensnared them in an investigation. More
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Your Friday Briefing: A Crucial Moment in the Ukraine War
Plus the U.S. begins Jan. 6 hearings and Chinese pilots provoke U.S. allies.Good morning. We’re covering Ukraine’s fight for the Donbas and the start of Jan. 6 hearings in the U.S.A bridge, now destroyed by Russian forces, that once led into Sievierodonetsk.Ivor Prickett for The New York TimesDonbas’s fate is ‘being decided’President Volodymyr Zelensky described the battle for Sievierodonetsk as a crucial moment in what is increasingly a war of attrition in eastern Ukraine. “The fate of our Donbas is being decided there,” he said.Ukrainian forces are outgunned by the Russians. The city is burning as the sounds of gunfire echo from vicious street-by-street combat. If Sievierodonetsk and its sister city Lysychansk fall, Russia will control all of Luhansk, one of two provinces in the Donbas region.Ukraine’s defense minister said his country “desperately needs heavy weapons, and very fast.”Both sides are still struggling to control what Zelensky has called “dead cities” as Russian bombardment further destroys the metropolises in the east. Here are live updates.Deaths: Ukraine is keeping its casualty numbers secret. But on the front lines, fresh graves show how relentless the fighting has become.Rep. Dan Kildee, a committee member, spoke before the start of the hearing.Doug Mills/The New York TimesThe U.S. begins Jan. 6 hearingsThe House panel investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol will open public hearings in Washington to begin setting out the findings from its nearly yearlong investigation.Lawmakers plan to start the session by presenting previously unreleased video testimony from people close to Donald Trump. They will also share footage revealing the role of the far-right group the Proud Boys in the riot on Jan. 6, 2021.The committee intends to paint a picture of Trump at the center of a coordinated effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election that led to the attack. We have live updates.“We’ll demonstrate the multipronged effort to overturn a presidential election, how one strategy to subvert the election led to another, culminating in a violent attack on our democracy,” said Representative Adam Schiff of California, a Democrat and a member of the committee.Details: The first hearing begins at 8 p.m. Eastern time (that’s 8 a.m. in Hong Kong). A total of six hearings are planned for this month.Resources: The Times has constructed an exhaustive timeline of the attack — the planning beforehand, the events at the Capitol and the preparation for the hearings.Trump: Lawyers plan to question the former president under oath as part of a separate investigation into his business practices led by the New York State attorney general’s office.A Chinese J-16 fighter jet.Taiwan Ministry of Defense, via Associated PressChinese pilots provoke U.S. alliesAustralia and Canada say Chinese military jets have harassed their planes in recent weeks, sometimes flying so close that the pilots could see each other.Beijing says the maneuvers are reasonable responses to foreign military patrols that threaten its security. But the two U.S. allies worry the pilots’ actions could lead to midair collisions.Any such mishap in the Asia Pacific could ignite an international incident at a time when tensions are rising between China and the West.Background: In 2001, a Chinese fighter jet collided with a U.S. Navy surveillance plane, leading to tense negotiations and an apology from the U.S. Beijing has honored the fallen pilot, Wang Wei, whose confrontational way of flying is held up as a model for new Chinese pilots to emulate, an expert said.Details: The Chinese pilots have repeatedly buzzed a Canadian plane monitoring North Korea in recent weeks, and one plane sprayed metallic chaff in the path of an Australian surveillance aircraft.THE LATEST NEWSAsiaSouth Korean rescue teams and firefighters on the scene yesterday.Lee Mu-Yeol/NEWSIS, via Associated PressAn explosion killed at least seven people at a law firm in Daegu, South Korea. The police suspect arson.Vietnam’s health minister and Hanoi’s mayor were arrested in connection with a corruption scandal involving coronavirus test kits.Thailand became the first Asian country to legalize growing and possessing marijuana, The Associated Press reported.World NewsThe U.S. House passed a package of gun control measures, but the bill stands no chance of becoming law because of Republican opposition in the Senate.President Biden opened the Summit of the Americas, which is focused on immigration and regional economic ties. Several prominent Latin American leaders are skipping the meeting. Here are live updates.As inflation continues to rise, the European Central Bank says that it will raise interest rates next month for the first time in 11 years.The Middle EastIran began dismantling the U.N. monitoring system of its nuclear program, just as the U.N. nuclear agency said it was only weeks away from producing enough enriched uranium to make a nuclear weapon.Israel’s prime minister, Naftali Bennett, made an impromptu visit to Abu Dhabi as his country and the U.A.E. presented a united front against Iran.What Else Is HappeningAn American tourist pushed an electric scooter down the Spanish Steps, causing 25,000 euros (about $27,000) in damage to the Roman landmark.Asteroid samples brought back to Earth by the Japanese space mission Hayabusa2 in December 2020 could shed new light on the chemistry of the solar system.The sale of single-use plastic products at U.S. national parks and on other public lands will be phased out over the next decade.A Morning ReadDom Phillips, center, interviewing Indigenous Brazilians in 2019.Joao Laet/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDom Phillips, a British journalist, and Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on Indigenous groups, disappeared in the Amazon after facing threats. They had gone to interview Indigenous people who patrol parts of the dense jungle plagued by illegal fishing, hunting and mining, a problem exacerbated by government budget cuts under President Jair Bolsonaro. They have not been seen since Sunday.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 4The battle for Sievierodonetsk. More
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Trump and Unreleased Video Expected to Be Focus of First Jan 6. Hearing
The House panel investigating the attack will lead its public sessions with video testimony from people close to the former president and footage revealing the role of the Proud Boys.WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol plans to open a landmark series of public hearings on Thursday by playing previously unreleased video of former President Donald J. Trump’s top aides and family members testifying before its staff, as well as footage revealing the role of the Proud Boys, a right-wing extremist group, in the assault.Committee aides say the evidence will show that Mr. Trump was at the center of a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election” that resulted in a mob of his supporters storming the halls of Congress and disrupting the official electoral count that is a pivotal step in the peaceful transfer of presidential power.The 8 p.m. hearing is the first in a series of six planned for this month, during which the panel will lay out for Americans the full magnitude and significance of Mr. Trump’s systematic drive to invalidate the 2020 election and remain in power.“We’ll demonstrate the multipronged effort to overturn a presidential election, how one strategy to subvert the election led to another, culminating in a violent attack on our democracy,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the committee. “It’s an important story, and one that must be told to ensure it never happens again.”The prime-time hearing will feature live testimony from a documentary filmmaker, Nick Quested, who was embedded with the Proud Boys during the attack, and a Capitol Police officer, Caroline Edwards, who was injured as rioters breached barricades and stormed into the building.The committee also plans to present what aides called a small but “meaningful” portion of the recorded interviews its investigators conducted with more than 1,000 witnesses, including senior Trump White House officials, campaign officials and Mr. Trump’s family members.Mr. Trump’s elder daughter Ivanka Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his son Donald Trump Jr. are among the high-profile witnesses who have testified before the panel.Mr. Quested, a British documentarian who has worked in war zones such as Afghanistan, spent a good deal of the postelection period filming members of the Proud Boys, including the group’s former chairman, Enrique Tarrio, who has been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the Capitol riot. Mr. Quested accompanied the Proud Boys to pro-Trump rallies in Washington in November and December 2020 and was on the ground with members of the group on Jan. 6, when several played a crucial role in breaching the Capitol.Mr. Quested was also present with a camera crew on the day before the attack, when Mr. Tarrio met in an underground parking garage near the Capitol with a small group of pro-Trump activists, including Stewart Rhodes, the founder and leader of the Oath Keepers militia. Late in the day on Jan. 6, Mr. Quested and his crew were with Mr. Tarrio in Baltimore, filming him as he responded in real time to news about the riot.Ms. Edwards, a well-respected Capitol Police officer, is believed to be the first officer injured in the attack, when she sustained a concussion during an assault at a barricade at the base of Capitol Hill. A man who has been charged with taking part in the assault, Ryan Samsel, told the F.B.I. during an interview more than a year ago that just before he approached the barricade, a high-ranking member of the Proud Boys, Joseph Biggs, had encouraged him to confront the police.Other officers around the building recall hearing Officer Edwards calling for help over the radio — one of the first signs that mob violence was beginning to overrun the police presence. Months after the attack, she continued to have fainting spells believed to be connected to her injuries.A committee aide said Mr. Quested and Officer Edwards would describe their experiences, including “what they saw and heard from the rioters who tried to occupy the Capitol and tried to stop the transfer of power.”The committee’s investigators believe Mr. Quested overheard conversations among the Proud Boys during the planning for Jan. 6.Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the committee chairman, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman, are expected to lead the presentation of the panel’s evidence and question the witnesses.The session will kick off an ambitious effort by the committee, which was formed in July after Republicans blocked the creation of a nonpartisan commission to investigate the attack, to lay out for Americans the full story of an unprecedented assault on U.S. democracy that led to a deadly riot, an impeachment and a crisis of confidence in the political system that continues to reverberate.The hearings are unfolding five months before midterm elections in which the Democrats’ majority is at stake, at a time when they are eager to draw a sharp contrast between themselves and the Republicans who enabled and embraced Mr. Trump, including the members of Congress who abetted his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.Other hearings are expected to focus on various aspects of the committee’s investigation, including Mr. Trump’s promotion of the lie that the election had been stolen, despite being told his claims were false; his attempts to misuse the Justice Department to help him cling to power; a pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to throw out legitimate electoral votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.; the way the mob was assembled, and how it descended on Washington on Jan. 6; and the fact that Mr. Trump did nothing to stop the violence for more than three hours while the assault was underway.The Jan. 6 panel has not yet committed to the full slate of witnesses for the six televised hearings, and it is still discussing the possibility of public testimony with several prominent Trump-era officials.Among the witnesses the committee has formally approached to testify next week are Jeffrey A. Rosen, the former acting attorney general, and Richard P. Donoghue, the former acting deputy attorney general, according to two people briefed on the matter.Mr. Rosen and Mr. Donoghue have told multiple congressional committees that Mr. Trump and his allies pressured the department to falsely say that it had found voter fraud and to use its power to undo the election results. Last May, Mr. Rosen took part in a public hearing of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on events leading up to the assault on the Capitol.The Jan. 6 committee is still in informal talks with Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House Counsel, as well as Byung J. Pak, the former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, who abruptly resigned on Jan. 4, 2021, after learning that Mr. Trump planned to fire him for not finding voter fraud, according to those people familiar with the discussions.Mr. Cipollone would be able to speak on a range of issues, including Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department and his unwillingness to accept the results of the election, despite the fact that officials time and again failed to uncover fraud.Mr. Pak could have information pertaining to Georgia, a battleground state that Mr. Trump was particularly fixated on.Alan Feuer More
