WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol will hold six more public hearings this month featuring evidence that Trump directed the mob to march on the Capitol and live testimony from White House staff, ranking member Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said.
Cheney and Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., outlined Thursday night how they plan to structure the committee’s other hearings that they plan to pack into June.
Thompson said the second hearing, set for Monday, June 13, will “examine the lies” that led people to storm the Capitol, “to try to stop the transfer of power.”
Other hearings will examine, for example, Trump’s pressure campaign on states to change the election results and how Trump tried to oust the acting attorney general so that he could use the Department of Justice to spread his claims of a stolen election.
Cheney said lawmakers will present evidence during future hearings that demonstrates what motivated the violence, “including directly from those who participated in this attack.” She said the panel will share videos of them, social media posts and what they’ve said in federal court.
Second hearing
The committee is scheduled to hold its second hearing on Monday at 10 a.m. ET. One witness who’s expected to testify is Chris Stirewalt, who previously worked as Fox News’ political editor.
Stirewalt has been sharply critical of his former Fox colleagues’ coverage of the election and Trump’s lies about it afterward. Trump and his allies have repeatedly attacked Fox for being the first network to call Arizona for Joe Biden.
While he declined to provide specific details about his testimony, Stirewalt said on NewsNation Friday, “This is the first time in all of American history, that we really threaten the concept of the peaceful transference of power.”
“Whatever the political interests of the two parties and individuals involved is, our real hope has to be that this is that this will teach us and help us to avoid these problems going forward,” he added.
Cheney said the hearing will revolve around Trump’s effort “to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him” despite hearing from numerous advisers that he had lost.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr told the committee, for instance, that he repeatedly told Trump that the Department of Justice hadn’t seen any evidence of fraud that affected the election. He said he told the president his claims about Dominion voting machines were “crazy stuff.”
Ivanka Trump told the committee she “accepted” Barr’s statement, saying it affected her perspective about the election.
Third hearing
The committee plans to hold the third hearing on Wednesday, June 15, at 10 a.m. ET.
Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen will testify at this hearing, his attorney Reginald Brown said in a letter to the committee Friday, which was confirmed by NBC News. Former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and Steve Engel, former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel, will also appear and testify, Brown said.
This hearing will offer evidence about Trump’s unsuccessful plan to oust Rosen and replace him with another DOJ official who was more supportive of Trump’s fraud claims, Jeffrey Clark, according to Cheney. Clark drafted a letter to states that said the department “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election.”
“In our hearings, you will hear first-hand how the senior leadership of the department threatened to resign, how the White House Counsel threatened to resign, and how they confronted Donald Trump and Jeff Clark in the Oval Office,” Cheney said Thursday.
Fourth hearing
This hearing, which hasn’t been scheduled yet, will focus on Trump’s efforts to pressure Pence “to refuse to count certain electoral votes on Jan. 6,” according to Cheney.
Cheney said the committee will present testimony from Pence’s former general counsel, Greg Jacob, saying what Trump demanded of Pence “wasn’t just wrong, it was illegal and unconstitutional.”
“Witnesses in these hearings will explain how the former vice president and his staff informed President Trump over and over again that what he was pressuring Mike Pence to do was illegal,” she said Thursday as she previewed the hearings.
The committee will show how Trump pressured Pence both in private and public, she said, and will present “evidence of that pressure from multiple witnesses live and on recorded video.”
Fifth hearing
The committee’s fifth hearing will reveal evidence about Trump’s plan to pressure state legislators and election officials to change election results.
Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his deputy, Gabe Sterling, will publicly testify at the hearing, scheduled for June 21, according to a source familiar with the plans.
Trump made the infamous January 2021 phone call to Raffensperger, directing him to “find” 11,780 votes that didn’t exist.
Raffensperger, Sterling and Frances Watson — Georgia’s former chief elections investigator who Trump also called in late December 2020 to pressure to find “dishonesty” — previously met with the committee.
The hearing will focus on Trump’s efforts to get states to rescind certified electoral slates without any basis, Cheney said.
“You will hear new details about the Trump campaign and other Trump associates’ efforts to instruct Republicans in multiple states to create intentionally false electoral slates, and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives, falsely certifying that Trump won states he actually lost,” she said.
Final two June hearings
Cheney said that, in the final June hearings, the committee will examine how Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them to “illegally” march on the U.S. Capitol.
She said a pivotal moment came on Dec. 18, 2020, when Trump posted a tweet telling people to come to Washington on Jan. 6, saying it “will be wild!” The tweet came not long after a meeting Trump had at the White House with former Gen. Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others who backed his fraud claims and who stayed late into the evening that night.
“You will also hear that President Trump met with that group alone for a period of time before White House lawyers and other staff discovered that the group was there, and rushed to intervene,” Cheney said.
The final hearing, she said, will be “a moment-by-moment account of the hourslong attack from more than a half dozen White House staff, both live in the hearing room and via videotaped testimony.”
This includes Trump refusing advice from his allies and aides to stop the attack.
“He did not talk to his attorney general. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day and made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets. But Mike Pence did each of those things,” Cheney said.
Cheney said that upcoming hearings will feature additional testimony about Trump’s statements in the White House that day, including his alleged approval of rioters shouting “hang Mike Pence,” though it’s unclear if that will feature in these final hearings.