5 things to watch for in 1st public hearing on Jan. 6 Capitol attack

WASHINGTON — The first public hearing by a special House committee investigating Trump loyalists’ attack on the U.S. Capitol that disrupted lawmakers meeting to certify President Joe Biden’s election on Jan. 6, 2021, will be on prime-time television Thursday night.

The two-hour hearing beginning at 8 p.m. will highlight the crowd’s violence with testimony by Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a brain injury as the first officer rioters attacked, and filmmaker Nick Quested, who documented the assault on the Capitol.

“We're going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the Jan. 6 Select Committee, told Washington Post Live on Monday.

That story, Raskin said, will focus on former President Donald Trump and his allies, and it will be up to lawmakers, the public and prosecutors to decide how to respond to the evidence.

The Jan. 6 committee plans to hold at least six public hearings that will feature live witnesses, taped interviews with White House insiders and Trump family members, emails and texts, and previously unseen videos — based on more than 1,000 interviews and 125,000 records.

Next week the committee will hold public hearings at 10 a.m. on Monday and Wednesday.

Led by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) as chairman and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as vice chair, the committee includes seven Democrats and two Republicans chosen by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) after Republicans nixed a stand-alone commission.

Here are five issues to consider for the hearings tonight and in the future.

What’s new

The committee will present evidence that it says shows a campaign to spread false claims of voting fraud to insist that Democrats stole the election from Trump and a coordinated effort inside and outside the White House to disrupt certification of Biden’s election.

Leaked revelations hint at dramatic findings: panicked texts about the violence, discussions of martial law, a seven-hour gap in Trump’s phone logs on Jan. 6 as he took no action while watching the melee at the Capitol on television.

Raskin said the majority of the House and Senate voted to approve charges in the second impeachment of Trump that said he incited “the insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2021, but the Senate vote fell short of the two-thirds necessary to impeach Trump.

“But the select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here,” he said, “and we are going to be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on January 6.”

Keep a score card

As with any alleged conspiracy, expect to hear many names — some familiar, most not.

The hearings will focus on figures who the committee determined played key roles in the effort to keep Trump in office, including his last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and advisers Stephen Miller, Rudy Giuliani and a handful of Republican House members.

Another major figure in the hearings will be John Eastman, a lawyer and former law professor who wrote a debunked legal justification for Vice President Mike Pence to reject state electoral votes on Jan. 6 to delay Biden’s certification or to throw the election to Trump.

Trump and those allies won’t testify. But the committee said it has interviewed insiders who saw and heard what went on in the White House from the election to the certification.

And possible witnesses include White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short and general counsel Gary Jacob, Meadow’s aide Cassidy Hutchinson, and conservative former federal judge Michael Luttig.

Criminal findings?

One big question looming over the hearings is whether the committee will produce evidence that shows illegal acts on the part of Trump or his aides and collaborators.

Some committee members believe that’s the case. But they said they would leave that determination to the Justice Department, which has opened its own investigation.

Raskin highlighted a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge David Carter in a case the committee filed to force Eastman to turn over emails. In it, Carter said it’s “more likely than not that President Trump corruptly attempted to obstruct the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department has charged more than 850 of the rioters.

Last week the department indicted former Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio and four members of his far-right group for seditious conspiracy. In January, seditious conspiracy charges were filed against far-right Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and 10 others.

Trump and his aides have denied breaking the law as they continue to accuse Democrats of stealing the election.

Skewed show?

All but two Republicans opposed the creation of the Jan. 6 Select Committee, and during the hearings they plan to discredit it and its findings with their own versions of the evidence.

“Attack Nancy Pelosi's committee and its members, portraying them as partisan, illegitimate, and a distraction for real issues,” a Republican National Committee memo said.

On Long Island, Rep. Andrew Garbarino of Bayport called the committee “partisan political grandstanding” and Rep. Lee Zeldin of Shirley accused Pelosi of “delegitimizing the committee” by barring Republicans from choosing their own members.

Jan. 6 Committee members point out that many witnesses are Republicans.

And Cheney said in a Dispatch Live interview: “If we really want to understand why January 6th is a line that can never be crossed again, then we really do have to put the politics and partisanship aside and say what happened.”

Historic record

The hearings, coincidentally, come just after the 50th anniversary of Watergate.

“There's going to be a theme about ‘What did Trump know, and when did he know it?’ ” Larry Jacobs, director of University of Minnesota’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, told Newsday.

“You can see how the written record that was put together during the [President Richard] Nixon impeachment trial has endured. There's really almost no one who disputes what happened,” Jacobs said.

The Jan. 6 Committee has compiled “quite a bit of evidence of different types that are going to be irrefutable — photographs, emails, texts, witness testimony,” he said.

“The longer-term picture is that these hearings are going to solidify facts, and those facts will endure,” he said. “So the histories that are written midcentury, it's going to be pretty clear about what happened,” Jacobs said.

“And that,” he said, “wouldn't have happened without the committee.”