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      Trump knew crowd at rally was armed yet demanded they be allowed to march

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      Trump knew crowd at rally was armed yet demanded they be allowed to marchCassidy Hutchinson, aide of ex-chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified former president didn’t care people had guns on them Donald Trump knew members of the crowd at his rally near the White House on 6 January 2021 were armed, but demanded security apparatus be removed to allow them closer, then instructed the crowd to march on the US Capitol, a key witness told the January 6 committee.Cassidy Hutchinson: who is the ex-aide testifying in the January 6 hearings?Read moreAccording to the witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, the president later attempted to assault an aide who refused his demand that he go to the Capitol too.Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows, testified in person on Tuesday.She described how, backstage at the Ellipse shortly before his speech, Trump demanded supporters be allowed in, to fill the area to capacity as his remarks were shown on TV.The president was warned by a Secret Service official that protesters outside security magnetometers were carrying weapons.Trump said: “I don’t fucking care that they have weapons, they’re not here to hurt me. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here, let the people in and take the mags away.”Liz Cheney, vice-chair of the January 6 committee, led questioning of Hutchinson.The Wyoming Republican presented law enforcement recordings from 6 January 2021 in which officers described protesters carrying AR-15-style rifles and handguns.Cheney also presented evidence about protesters wearing body armour and carrying bear spray and flagpoles to use as spears.Cheney said: “Let’s reflect on that for a moment. President Trump was aware that a number of the individuals in the crowd had weapons and were wearing body armour. And here’s what President Trump instructed the crowd to do.”The committee played video of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse.Trump said: “We’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you … we’re gonna walk down to the Capitol.”The riot that ensued bore out a prediction Hutchinson said Meadows made to her on the evening of 2 January: “Things might get real, real bad on January 6.”A bipartisan Senate committee linked seven deaths to the riot, which failed to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. The January 6 committee has shown that the vice-president, Mike Pence, came within 40ft of the mob, members of which chanted that he should be hanged.In video testimony played in earlier hearings, Hutchinson described how Trump responded to such chants: saying maybe Pence deserved it, for refusing to reject electoral college results.Later in the hearing, Hutchinson relayed an astounding story of the president attempting a violent act himself.Hutchinson said Tony Ornato, a Secret Service official and deputy chief of staff, told her of a physical altercation in the presidential vehicle, the armoured limousine known as the Beast, when Trump was told he could not go to the Capitol too.Trump, Hutchinson said, tried to grab the steering wheel, then lunged at the chief of his security detail.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      January 6 hearing: former aide to Mark Meadows to testify – live

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      It’s worth noting that Cassidy Hutchinson recently changed her legal representation in connection to the January 6 investigation.Hutchinson’s decision to replace her former lawyer, Stefan Passantino, with Jody Hunt of the law firm Alston Bird was interpreted as a signal of her increased willingness to cooperate with the January 6 committee’s requests for information.Politico reported earlier this month:.css-knbk2a{height:1em;width:1.5em;margin-right:3px;vertical-align:baseline;fill:#C70000;} Hutchinson’s former attorney, Stefan Passantino, has deep Trump World connections. Her new lawyer, Jody Hunt, is a longtime close ally of Jeff Sessions and served as his chief of staff when the former attorney general enraged Trump by recusing from the Russia probe. …
      Passantino, Hutchinson’s former attorney, was the Trump White House’s chief ethics lawyer. And Passantino’s firm, Michael Best, has Trump World connections; its president is former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, and Justin Clark — also a top Trump World lawyer — is currently on leave from the firm, according to its website.Today’s testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson could also reveal more details about Donald Trump’s response to insurrectionists’ chants of “Hang Mike Pence!” on January 6.At the January 6 committee’s first public hearing earlier this month, Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the panel, said witness testimony indicated Trump was informed of the chants and reacted approvingly to them.“You will hear that President Trump was yelling and ‘really angry’ at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more,” Cheney said at the first hearing. “And aware of the rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence, the president responded with this sentiment, ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence ‘deserves it.’”According to CNN, Hutchinson was the witness who provided the committee with that information, so today’s hearing could give her an opportunity to offer valuable new insight into how Trump reacted as January 6 turned violent. The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is expected to hear live public testimony on Tuesday from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to Donald Trump, according to a source familiar with the matter.The committee on Monday abruptly scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, suggesting a sense of urgency to disclose what it said was “recently obtained evidence”. The committee had previously said it would not hold any more hearings until next month.It is the sixth public hearing held by the committee after a year-long investigation into the Capitol attack. Two more hearings are expected next month.The hearings next month are expected to delve into the role of far-right and paramilitary groups organized and prepared for the January 6 attack and Trump’s abdication of leadership during the hours-long siege of the Capitol.January 6 committee schedules surprise session to hear new evidenceRead moreJoe Biden will meet tomorrow with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey, as the two leaders attend the Nato summit in Madrid, Spain.The White House announced the planned meeting during the daily press briefing, which was held today aboard Air Force One as Biden flew from Germany, where he attended the G7 summit, to Spain.Biden has just arrived in Madrid, where he will soon meet with the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, and King Felipe VI.The exact format and timing of the Erdoğan meeting is still unclear, but Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters that the focus of the discussion would be on US-Turkish relations and the bids from Finland and Sweden to join Nato.Turkey has raised objections to Finland and Sweden’s bids, which were submitted in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Erdoğan has specifically accused Sweden of being a “hatchery” for terrorist organizations, per Reuters.The meeting tomorrow could give Biden an opportunity to press Erdoğan on those reservations and attempt to convince him to support Nato membership for Finland and Sweden.It remains unclear what new information Cassidy Hutchinson, former senior aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, might provide in her testimony today before the January 6 committee.But according to Brendan Buck, a longtime adviser to former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan, Hutchinson joined every meeting that Meadows participated in as a congressman. (Meadows served in the House from 2013 to 2020.)“I don’t know Cassidy Hutchinson, and I can’t speak to how things worked at the White House, but when Meadows was on the Hill he always insisted that she be in *every* meeting he had, no matter how small,” Buck said on Twitter. “It was odd then, and [doesn’t] seem to be working out for him now.”I don’t know Cassidy Hutchinson, and I can’t speak to how things worked at the White House, but when Meadows was on the Hill he always insisted that she be in *every* meeting he had, no matter how small. It was odd then, and doesnt seem to be working out for him now.— Brendan Buck (@BrendanBuck) June 28, 2022
      The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trump’s children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.The calls among Trump’s children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former president’s children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.House investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.Read the Guardian’s full report:January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trump’s children and aidesRead moreGreetings from Washington, live blog readers.The House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection will hold its sixth public hearing of the month at 1pm ET, after the panel surprisingly announced the event yesterday.According to multiple reports, the star witness for today’s surprise hearing will be Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, who served as Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff. (Punchbowl News first reported Hutchinson’s expected appearance.)Hutchinson has already spoken to investigators behind closed doors, and she provided the committee with some of its most damning evidence about the Trump White House’s ties to the attack on the Capitol.In a clip of her private testimony played at a hearing last week, Hutchinson named several Republican members of Congress who sought president pardons in connection to their involvement in the insurrection.Today could give Hutchinson her first opportunity to speak directly to the American people about what she witnessed in the White House on January 6 and in the aftermath of that violent day.The hearing will kick off in a few hours, and the blog will have updates and analysis once it starts. Stay tuned.And here’s what else is happening today:
      Joe Biden is traveling from Germany to Spain. Biden is participating in the final day of the G7 summit in Schloss Elmau, Germany, before traveling on to Madrid, Spain, for the start of the Nato summit.
      Karine Jean-Pierre will gaggle with reporters aboard Air Force One en route to Madrid. The White House press secretary will be joined by Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser.
      Today marks the 10th anniversary of the supreme court’s decision to uphold key portions of the Affordable Care Act. The anniversary comes as the country awaits the court’s final four decisions of the term, which has already seen conservative justices overturn Roe v Wade and deliver a major victory to gun rights groups.
      The blog will have more coming up, so stick around. More

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      Cassidy Hutchinson: who is the ex-aide testifying in the January 6 hearings?

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      Cassidy Hutchinson: who is the ex-aide testifying in the January 6 hearings?The former executive assistant to Mark Meadows will be the first ex-Trump White House employee to testify in person The House January 6 hearings into the attack on the Capitol may not yet have found their John Dean – the White House counsel who turned on President Richard Nixon during Watergate – but in Cassidy Hutchinson they have turned up a surprisingly potent witness.January 6 hearing: former aide to Mark Meadows to reportedly testify – liveRead moreHutchinson was an executive assistant to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s last chief of staff, and a special assistant to the president for legislative affairs.In taped testimony, she has described Trump’s approval of chants from Capitol rioters about hanging the then vice-president, Mike Pence, and attempts by Republicans in Congress to have Trump issue pardons before leaving office.On Tuesday, she is expected to testify in person – the first former Trump White House employee to do so.According to Hutchinson’s LinkedIn page, she studied political science and American studies at Christopher Newport University, a public school in Virginia. Hutchinson’s page also follows St Andrew’s Episcopal school, in Austin, Texas.While in college, Hutchinson interned at the Trump White House. In October 2018, she told her student newspaper she was “brought to tears when I received the email that I had been selected to participate”, and called the internship “an honor and a tremendous growing experience”.Hutchinson also interned and for two powerful figures on the hard right of a hard-right party: Steve Scalise, the House Republican whip, and the Texas senator Ted Cruz.According to the Washington Post, Hutchinson recently switched lawyers, swapping a former Trump White House ethics lawyer for an attorney with links to Jeff Sessions, the former Alabama senator who became the attorney general Trump fired in 2018.That move, the Post said, indicated a new willingness to cooperate with the January 6 committee.Hutchinson’s former boss, Meadows, first flirted with cooperating with the committee then refused to do so. The committee referred him to the Department of Justice (DoJ), for criminal contempt of Congress. The DoJ declined to pursue charges.In the absence of testimony from Meadows, Hutchinson’s voice has come to the fore in a series of explosive hearings.Earlier this month, Norm Eisen, a former ethics tsar in the Obama White House, told the Post: “Cassidy Hutchinson might turn out to be the next John Dean.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackTrump administrationUS politicsexplainersReuse this content More

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      January 6 committee schedules surprise session to hear new evidence

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      January 6 committee schedules surprise session to hear new evidenceSense of urgency suggested by sudden plan to hear new testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Mark Meadows The House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection is expected to hear live public testimony on Tuesday from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Mark Meadows, the last chief of staff to Donald Trump, according to a source familiar with the matter.The committee on Monday abruptly scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, suggesting a sense of urgency to disclose what it said was “recently obtained evidence”. The committee had previously said it would not hold any more hearings until next month.It is the sixth public hearing held by the committee after a year-long investigation into the Capitol attack. Two more hearings are expected next month.The session is scheduled for 1pm on Capitol Hill, the committee announced. Hutchinson’s appearance before the committee was first reported by Punchbowl News and later confirmed by other outlets, including the Guardian.Hutchinson has provided the committee with some of its most shocking revelations, including that Trump approved of his supporters chanting “Hang Mike Pence” and that several far-right members of Congress who had attempted to stop the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory sought pardons after the attack. The disclosures emerged during Hutchinson’s closed-door testimony to the committee, videos of which have been played during the hearings.Tuesday’s hearing came as a surprise after Mississippi congressman Bennie Thompson, the chair, said last week that the panel would not hold another hearing until July. But the committee also made clear that the public sessions were prompting more witnesses to come forward, helping to uncover new evidence about what Thompson said was the “culmination of an attempted coup”.In its episodic presentation, the committee has made use of recorded depositions with witnesses, blending the tapes with moving public testimony and dramatic speech-making from lawmakers and staff who led the investigation. At the end of each hearing, members of the panel have directed anyone with information to their tip line and called on those with direct knowledge of the events to come forward and testify publicly.The committee recently obtained documentary footage from the British film-maker Alex Holder, who was embedded with Trump, his family and inner circle from before the election to after the January 6 attack. The committee is particularly interested in footage he captured involving phone calls and conversations among Trump’s children and top aides discussing election strategies on the evening of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, sources told the Guardian.Holder is cooperating with the committee.The hearings next month are expected to delve into the role of far-right and paramilitary groups organized and prepared for the January 6 attack and Trump’s abdication of leadership during the hours-long siege of the Capitol.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpnewsReuse this content More

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      January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trump’s children and aides weeks before election

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      January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trump’s children and aides weeks before electionFootage captured by documentary film-maker understood to show former president’s children privately discussing election strategies The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trump’s children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.The calls among Trump’s children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington DC that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former president’s children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.‘Watergate for streaming era’: how the January 6 panel created gripping hearingsRead moreHouse investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.The film-maker testified that he had recorded around seven hours of one-to-one interviews with Trump, then-vice president Mike Pence, Trump’s adult children and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the sources said, as well as around 110 hours of footage from the campaign.But one part of Holder’s testimony that particularly piqued the interest of the members of the select committee and chief investigative counsel Tim Heaphy was when he disclosed that he had managed to record discussions at the 29 September 2020 event.The select committee is closely focused on the footage of the event – in addition to the content of the one-on-one interviews with Trump and Ivanka – because the discussions about strategies mirror similar conversations at that time by top Trump advisors.On the night of the first presidential debate, Trump’s top former strategist Steve Bannon said in an interview with HBO’s The Circus that the outcome of the 2020 election would be decided at the state level and eventually at the congressional certification on January 6.“They’re going to try and overturn this election with uncertified votes,” Bannon said. Asked how he expects the election to end, Bannon said: “Right before noon on the 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency.”The select committee believes that ideas such as Bannon’s were communicated to advisors to Donald Jr and his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, even before the 2020 election had taken place, the sources said – leading House investigators to want to review the Trump hotel footage.What appears to interest the panel is whether Trump and his children had planned to somehow stop the certification of the election on January 6 – a potential violation of federal law – and to force a contingent election if Trump lost as early as September.The event was not open to the public, Holder is said to have testified, and the documentary film-maker was waved into the Trump hotel by Eric Trump. At some point after Holder caught the calls on tape, he is said to have been asked to leave by Donald Jr.Among the conversations captured on film was Eric Trump on the phone to an unidentified person saying, according to one source familiar: “Hopefully you’re voting in Florida as opposed to the other state you’ve mentioned.”January 6 hearings: if Republicans did nothing wrong, why were pardons sought?Read moreThe phone call – a clip of which was reviewed by the Guardian – was one of several by some of the people closest to Trump that Holder memorialized in his film, titled Unprecedented, which is due to be released in a three-part series later this year on Discovery+.Holder also testified to the select committee, the sources said, about the content of the interviews. Holder interviewed Trump in early December 2020 at the White House, and then twice a few months after the Capitol attack both at Mar-a-Lago and his Bedminster golf club.The select committee found Holder’s testimony and material more explosive than they had expected, the sources said. Holder, for instance, showed the panel a discrepancy between Ivanka Trump’s testimony to the panel and Holder’s camera.In her interview in December 2020, the New York Times earlier reported, Ivanka said her father should “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted” because people were questioning “the sanctity of our elections”.That interview was recorded nine days after former attorney general William Barr told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. But in her interview with the select committee, Ivanka said she had “accepted” what Barr had said.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansDonald Trump JrSteve BannonnewsReuse this content More

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      January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trump’s children and aides

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      January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trump’s children and aidesFootage captured by documentary film-maker understood to show ex-president’s children privately discussing election strategies The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trump’s children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.The calls among Trump’s children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former president’s children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.‘Watergate for streaming era’: how the January 6 panel created gripping hearingsRead moreHouse investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.The film-maker testified that he had recorded around seven hours of one-to-one interviews with Trump, then-vice president Mike Pence, Trump’s adult children and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, the sources said, as well as around 110 hours of footage from the campaign.But one part of Holder’s testimony that particularly piqued the interest of the members of the select committee and chief investigative counsel Tim Heaphy was when he disclosed that he had managed to record discussions at the 29 September event.The select committee is closely focused on the footage of the event – in addition to the content of the one-on-one interviews with Trump and Ivanka – because the discussions about strategies mirror similar conversations at that time by top Trump advisors.On the night of the first presidential debate, Trump’s top former strategist Steve Bannon said in an interview with The Circus on Showtime that the outcome of the election would be decided at the state level and eventually at the congressional certification on January 6.“They’re going to try and overturn this election with uncertified votes,” Bannon said. Asked how he expects the election to end, Bannon said: “Right before noon on the 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency.”The select committee believes that ideas such as Bannon’s were communicated to advisers to Donald Jr and his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, even before the 2020 election had taken place, the sources said – leading House investigators to want to review the Trump hotel footage.What appears to interest the panel is whether Trump and his children had planned to somehow stop the certification of the election on January 6 – a potential violation of federal law – and to force a contingent election if Trump lost as early as September.The event was not open to the public, Holder is said to have testified, and the documentary film-maker was waved into the Trump hotel by Eric Trump. At some point after Holder caught the calls on tape, he is said to have been asked to leave by Donald Jr.Among the conversations captured on film was Eric Trump on the phone to an unidentified person saying, according to one source familiar: “Hopefully you’re voting in Florida as opposed to the other state you’ve mentioned.”January 6 hearings: if Republicans did nothing wrong, why were pardons sought?Read moreThe phone call – a clip of which was reviewed by the Guardian – was one of several by some of the people closest to Trump that Holder memorialized in his film, titled Unprecedented, which is due to be released in a three-part series later this year on Discovery+.Holder also testified to the select committee, the sources said, about the content of the interviews. Holder interviewed Trump in early December 2020 at the White House, and then twice a few months after the Capitol attack both at Mar-a-Lago and his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey.The select committee found Holder’s testimony and material more explosive than they had expected, the sources said. Holder, for instance, showed the panel a discrepancy between Ivanka Trump’s testimony to the panel and Holder’s camera.In her interview in December 2020, the New York Times earlier reported, Ivanka said her father should “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted” because people were questioning “the sanctity of our elections”.That interview was recorded nine days after former attorney general William Barr told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. But in her interview with the select committee, Ivanka said she had “accepted” what Barr had said.TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackUS politicsDonald TrumpRepublicansDonald Trump JrSteve BannonnewsReuse this content More

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      Feds seize phone of ex-Trump lawyer who aided effort to overturn election

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      Feds seize phone of ex-Trump lawyer who aided effort to overturn electionJohn Eastman had put forth the proposal for then vice-president Mike Pence to halt the certification of electoral votes A conservative lawyer who aided former President Donald Trump’s efforts to undo the 2020 election results and who has been repeatedly referenced in House hearings on the January 6assault on the Capitol said on Monday that federal agents seized his cellphone last week.‘Watergate for streaming era’: how the January 6 panel created gripping hearingsRead moreJohn Eastman said the agents took his phone as he left a restaurant last Wednesday evening, the same day law enforcement officials conducted similar activity around the country as part of broadening investigations into efforts by Trump allies to overturn the election results in an unsuccessful bid to keep the Republican president in power.Eastman said the agents who approached him identified themselves as from the FBI but appeared to be serving a warrant on behalf of the justice department’s office of inspector general, which he contends has no jurisdiction to investigate him since he has never worked for the department.The action was disclosed in a filing in federal court in New Mexico in which Eastman challenges the legitimacy of the warrant, calling it overly broad, and asks that a court force the federal government to return his phone. The filing does not specify where exactly agents seized his phone, and a lawyer for Eastman did not immediately return an email seeking comment.Federal agents last week served a raft of subpoenas related to a scheme by Trump allies to put forward fake slates of electors in hopes of invalidating the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. Also that day, agents searched the Virginia home of Jeffrey Clark, a Trump justice department official who encouraged Trump’s challenges of the election results.A spokeswoman for the inspector general’s office declined to comment. Eastman, who last year resigned his position as a law professor at Chapman University, has been a central figure in the ongoing hearings by the House committee investigating the riot at the Capitol, though he has not been among the witnesses to testify.The committee has heard testimony about how Eastman put forward a last-ditch, unorthodox proposal challenging the workings of the 130-year-old Electoral Count Act, which governs the process for tallying the election results in Congress.The committee has heard testimony about how Eastman pushed for vice-president Mike Pence to deviate from his ceremonial role and halt the certification of the electoral votes, a step Pence had no legal power to take and refused to attempt.Eastman’s plan was to have the states send alternative slates of electors from states Trump was disputing, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.With competing slates for Trump or Biden, Pence would be forced to reject them, returning them to the states to sort it out, under the plan.A lawyer for Pence, Greg Jacob, detailed for the committee at a hearing earlier this month how he had fended off Eastman’s pressure. The panel played video showing Eastman repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination while being interviewed by the committee.Eastman later sought to be “on the pardon list,” according to an email he sent to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, shared by the committee. TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpNew MexicoUS politicsJanuary 6 hearingsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Watergate for streaming era’: how the January 6 panel created gripping hearings

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      ‘Watergate for streaming era’: how the January 6 panel created gripping hearingsThe committee have put on hearings that feel more like a Hollywood prestige limited series than a congressional inquiry There is a certain kind of ritual that has come to define a blockbuster congressional hearing in Washington.The star witnesses take their seats facing the dias, swamped by photographers. The committee chairman gives a solemn opening statement, followed by a statement from the ranking member of the minority party. There is some bickering over the rules for the hearing, whether it is a sham, sometimes followed by a theatrical effort to postpone the session. Eventually, the star witness gets to speak, and parries questions from the committee members, each party asking either friendly or aggressive questions, depending on the politics. The whole thing often lasts hours and can get somewhat confusing to follow. At the end of the day, newscasts are filled with highlight reels of the can’t miss moments.Get the latest updates on voting rights in the Guardian’s Fight to vote newsletterBut over the last few weeks, the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US capitol has broken that mold.Instead of just presenting the facts from their investigation, the committee has generated a clear narrative, teasing how each piece will connect to the next at a future hearing. They have promised and delivered on new sensational details making the hearings can’t miss television. The committee, which is getting advice from a former ABC News executive, have put on hearings that felt more like a Hollywood prestige limited series than a congressional inquiry.“They have put on the Watergate hearings for the streaming era,” said Norman Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House judiciary committee during Trump’s first impeachment.The committee has done this in a few key ways. They’ve broken up the hearings into several pieces, keeping each hearing to just a few hours (short by Congress’s standards) and focused on a particular topic. A single member of the committee, or professional staff, has handled the questioning, without interruptions from the opposing party. And the committee has placed a beating heart at the center of its investigation, featuring testimony from police officers, elected officials, and election workers who have all emotionally laid out the severe consequences of Trump’s investigative work.“What they’ve done brilliantly is use video, kind of the newest techniques of presenting narrative through video, with the most traditional, but powerful approach of having live witnesses. And they’ve blended the two and managed to tell a gripping account of a criminal conspiracy,” said Eisen, who now serves as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.Perhaps most significantly, the committee has made extraordinary use of over a year of investigative work. They frequently play video clips of government officials at the highest levels of government and in Trump’s inner circle detailing what was going on behind the scenes as Trump tried to overturn the election. In many of those clips, the officials have said they knew Trump’s claims about massive fraud were bunk and told him so. Their close ties to Trump make their words all the more damning.“Video is the top of the pyramid of what gets people’s attention,” said David Litt, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama. “The same set of words, if it’s a quote, it’s less valuable than audio, and audio is less valuable than video. I think they understood that.”The committee has also done a good job of feeding the appetite for constant new information by carefully meting out and teasing bombshell information, Litt said. During the first impeachment hearing, for example, Liz Cheney said that multiple Republican congressman sought presidential pardons, but didn’t reveal who. Cheney opened another hearing by saying that Rudy Giuliani was “apparently inebriated”, before later playing a clip of Jason Miller, a senior Trump adviser telling investigators that was the case. At one hearing, the committee also teased a video in which Eric Herchmann says he told John Eastman: “I’m going to give you the best free legal advice you’re ever getting in your life: get a great fucking criminal defense lawyer.”“They went out and they got the receipts and now they’re deploying them in a smart way where there’s this constant drip,” Litt said. “They understand that the drip drip drip is what holds interest in a story. Unfortunately we’ve seen this time and time again where there’s a bombshell, but someone just waits it out because all the shoes drop at once.”Some of the committee’s biggest success may also be the result of a strategic error by Republicans. After Nancy Pelosi blocked two Republicans who voted to overturn the election from serving on the January 6 committee last year, Kevin McCarthy, the Republican said he wouldn’t appoint any Republicans to the panel. That decision left Trump without any allies on the commission to challenge the committee’s inquiries or throw out distracting questions to muddy the water during hearings. Trump has said in recent days that McCarthy’s decision was a mistake.Now, the committee has shown a remarkable discipline in its effort to investigate witnesses without having to worry about sideshows. Republican witnesses who might otherwise have been reluctant to testify publicly and face grandstanding from Republican members, might now feel more comfortable coming forward, Litt said.But even though the committee has succeeded in creating remarkably compelling hearings, will the hearings actually break through? Part of that depends on who the audience is. In one sense, the entire investigation has a very specific audience, the US justice department, which is weighing whether to bring criminal charges against Trump and allies. And it’s difficult to say whether the hearings will sway Attorney General Merrick Garland and other justice department officials one way or the other.For another audience, the committee’s work may be succeeding. The committee’s work is never going to convince diehard Trump supporters that the election wasn’t stolen, Litt noted. But more than a year and a half after January 6, the committee is forcing the events of January 6 to be at the center of America’s political discourse.“When I was writing speeches, the important thing I used to say is that you can’t tell people what to think, but you can tell them what to think about,” Litt said. “And a large percentage of the most influential people in American media, business and politics are thinking about what happened on January 6 and why. And whether the people responsible have been held accountable.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More