The assistants described the first public hearing, which will take place in prime time, as the committee begins – previewing what will follow at the scheduled hearings this month. On Thursday, the commission plans to show videos of testimonies it has not seen before during closed testimonies that include interviews with Trump White House aides, campaign officials and members of the Trump family. The commission’s aides said they also plan to show videos to remind the public of what happened on January 6 when the Capitol was flooded by a mob. “We will bring the American people back to the reality of this violence and remind them how horrific it was,” said one aide. The committee said the “vast majority” of the video it intends to show has not been seen in public in the past. This video will be supplemented by live testimonies from two witnesses who were close to the rioters: U.S. Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who was among the first to be injured by rioters on Jan. 6, and documentary Nick Quested, who was unique access to members of militia groups involved in the attack. The commission will seek to use this information to draw a straight line between Trump and the groups that committed the violence on January 6. Commission Chairman Bennie Thompson and Vice President Liz Cheney will make inaugural statements and will be questioning witnesses Thursday, aides said. Although the hearings will not be the committee’s last word – a report is scheduled for later in the year – it is the committee’s most important opportunity to convince a hard-line audience why it should be interested in What Happened Jan. 6 Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are preparing their own counter-programming to attack the commission’s work as a political attack on Trump.
Trump’s campaign of pressure and inaction on January 6
Thursday’s hearing is the first in a series scheduled this month to show what the commission’s months-long investigation into January 6 revealed. Aides said the inaugural hearing would be used to present a summary of the commission’s findings, all of which refer to Trump himself. The two witnesses who will testify on Thursday will play a key role in the opening statement. “We expect them to share their experiences, especially what they saw and heard from the rioters who tried to occupy the Capitol, from the rioters who tried to stop the transfer of power,” aides to the commission told reporters. Future hearings are expected to be based on what will happen on Thursday night. CNN previously reported that former Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and then-Deputy Attorney Richard Donogu were invited by the commission to testify at one of its public hearings. Rosen and Donoghue have previously spoken with the panel behind closed doors about Trump’s campaign of pressure on senior Justice Department officials to investigate baseless allegations of electoral fraud. During the series of hearings, testimonies from former Vice President Mike Pence are also expected to be presented in some way. Trump and his allies launched a campaign of pressure against Pence as they tried to persuade him to help overturn the election result, and then-aides to the former vice president had detailed security concerns until Jan. 6 and Jan. 6. The panel is also expected to focus on what Trump did and did not do, as violence on the Capitol unfolded – linking the former president’s inaction to his role at the center of a wider conspiracy. The commission has video footage of former Trump officials and members of the Trump family, including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kouchner, who were with the president on Jan. 6 and can talk about what he did that day. Some of these shots will be revealed at the first hearing, but may also appear in later presentations.
Video from Trump’s close circle
The commission made more than 1,000 closed-door testimonies as part of its investigation, including several members of Trump’s inner circle: Ivanka Trump’s daughter and son-in-law Jared Kouchner, and senior White House aides Hope Hicks and Steven Mick. Now these deposits are likely to play a key role in the commission’s public hearings – even if Trump’s allies have no plans to testify in public, according to aides to the commission. The aides said they had no plans to make the transcripts public at the moment, meaning that the hearings would only include excerpts from what was said behind closed doors. However, the video could provide a new picture of what members of the Trump family thought about pushing the former president to overthrow the 2020 election. The committee’s aides also said Thursday’s hearing would include a new video of the violent attack on the Capitol itself. The video of the uprising created some of the most dramatic moments of the 2021 Senate’s trial, and aides say most of the video the jury intends to show at the hearings has not been seen before.
What will be missing: The opposition
While the committee hearing on Thursday, January 6 will have all the hallmarks of a formal congressional hearing – a presidency, inaugural statements, witnesses – one key element will be missing: any opposition. Aides said Thompson, a Democrat, and Cheney, a Republican, would make the most of the debate at Thursday’s inaugural hearing, showing how the committee is the product of a bipartisan effort. But while the Jan. 6 commission is made up of five Democrats and two Republicans, they are all working toward the same goal of showing how Trump was at the center of the Capitol attack. This will give the commission more control over what happens on Thursday. There will be no breaks, outbursts or arrogance from the committee’s opponents, as happened during the referral hearings in Parliament in 2019. But the regulation also means that the committee runs the risk of Thursday feeling more like a long presentation than a hearing in Congress. For Trump and his allies – who have repeatedly attacked the commission as its hearings approach – criticism of the hearings should come from abroad. That’s not to say they will not have a platform: Fox does not intend to broadcast the hearing on Thursday, so the channel’s conservative hosts can offer real-time programming.
