A year and a half after the worst attack on the US Capitol since Major General Robert Ross ordered it set ablaze in 1814, the House January 6 select committee had a daunting task during its first hearing into the Capitol riot.
Rep Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, opened the panel with a stark warning that set to lay out the stakes of the proceedings: American democracy “remains in danger”.
Mr Thompson said America could not“sweep what happened” on 6 January 2021 “under the rug”, as many of his Republican colleagues would wish, because the same types of threats that existed before that day remain extant.
That much was clear to a group of members of Congress who spent much of the January 6 insurrection trapped in the upper level of the House chamber. Those lawmakers arrived at the Cannon House Office Building’s ornate Caucus Room on Thursday ready to watch the committee begin presenting their preliminary findings from a year-long investigation.
The pack of Democrats, which has taken to calling themselves the “gallery group”, included House Progressive Caucus chair Pramila Jayapal, freshman Representative Cori Bush of Missouri, Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, Representative Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania, and several other Democratic members.
Speaking minutes before the start of the hearing, Mr Phillips told The Independent the group’s purpose in attending was to “bear witness to the results of the investigation”.
Asked what he expected to see, he said he hoped the select committee would present “an arc and a narrative and an explanation of what happened that day”.
“[Of the] 892 people charged, many will be going to jail, some are already there. But the ones who inspired it and enabled it are walking the halls of Congress and are walking the halls at Mar-a-Lago. And I hope there’s accountability,” he said.
Representative Steve Cohen, a Tennessee Democrat, told The Independent he expected “to see the truth revealed to the American public about Donald Trump’s and his team’s effort to pull a coup”.
For the first part of the hearing, those expectations may have been satisfied.
In their opening remarks, select committee chairman Bennie Thompson and vice-chair Liz Cheney walked spectators in the room and viewers watching on all the major US television networks (save for the pro-Trump Fox News Channel) through its plan for showing its’ findings to the American people.
“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” Ms Cheney said.
Here are some of the major revelations from the two-hour hearing.
A dire warning about democracy
Mr Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, opened his remarks with a stark warning about the possibility that what happened in January 2021 could happen again.
“The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over. There are those in this country who thirst for power but have no love or respect for what makes America great: devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, our shared journey to build a more perfect Union,” he said.
Mr Trump, he said, “was at the center” of the conspiracy, and “ultimately … spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the constitution to March down the Capitol and subvert American democracy”.
Top Trump officials and family members didn’t buy the Big Lie
Mr Thompson’s presentation also included excerpts of a taped deposition in which former attorney general Bill Barr denounced Mr Trump’s lies about the election.
Mr Barr, who met with the panel to give evidence last month, was shown telling committee members he had “made it clear [he] did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which [he] told the president was bulls***”.
“I repeatedly told the President in no uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud that would have affected the outcome of the election. And frankly, a year and a half later, I still haven’t,” he said.
Mr Thompson also revealed an excerpt from the panel’s interview with Ivanka Trump, the ex-president’s eldest daughter who served as a senior White House adviser during his presidency.
Regarding the ex-attorney general’s pronouncement that her father’s claims of election fraud were “bulls***,” Ms Trump told the committee: “I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he was saying”.
Ms Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, who served as a senior aide in the White House, also made an appearance in the hearing, saying in his deposition that he thought White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s threats to resign over January 6 amounted to “whining”.
“My interest at that time was on trying to get as many pardons done, and I know that he was always, him and the team, were always saying ‘Oh we are going to resign’. So, I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you,” Mr Kushner told the committee in a taped deposition.
Liz Cheney indicts fellow Republicans: ‘Your dishonour will remain’
Ms Cheney, who until last year served as the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, spoke after Mr Thompson opened the hearing, offering some of the most damning information revealed to date. In pristine detail, the Wyoming Republican laid out how Mr Trump’s refusal to act to quell the riot was fueled by his, “intention to remain President of the United States despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election, and in violation of his constitutional obligation to relinquish power.”
Ms Cheney meticulously laid out, in prosecutorial fashion, the framework for the committee’s subsequent hearings.
“You will hear testimony that ‘the president did not really want to put anything out calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave,” she said. “You will hear President Trump was yelling and really angry at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more”.
She also revealed that multiple House Republicans unsuccessfully sought presidential pardons after the 6 January riot, and offered a warning of her own to her erstwhile GOP colleagues.
“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain”, she said.
Harrowing never-before-seen footage
While the members of the “gallery group” sat stone-faced through Mr Thompson and Ms Cheney’s opening remarks, what followed was too much for some of them to bear.
The programme turned next to a compilation of heretofore unseen tapes of the attack which showed new images of rioters as they assaulted police officers, broke windows, and stormed the Capitol to disrupt Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
In the video, teed up by Mr Thompson, members of US Capitol Police were heard desperately calling for reinforcements as they are viciously attacked by a massive mob of Trump supporters who are seen smashing windows, striking officers, and wrestling with metal barricades.
“This is now effectively a riot,” one officer was heard saying over radio. “Fall back! Fall back!” another beleaguered officer yellde desperately as his position is overrun.
Mr Thompson laid out how the Proud Boys extremist group played into the Capitol attack.
“We have obtained substantial evidence showing that the President’s December 19th tweet, calling his followers to DC on January 6th, energised individuals from the Proud Boys and other extremist groups.”
The committee also found that the Proud Boys’ membership swelled “exponentially” after Mr Trump’s “stand back and stand by” remark at a presidential debate with Joe Biden.
Nick Quested, a documentarian working on a film about the Proud Boys, testified before the committee. He said the mood in Washington that day was “darker” than he anticipated.
Police officers speak out
Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards was one of the committee’s two witnesses on Thursday, recouting the grievous violence on the day of the Capitol attack.
“I was slipping in people’s blood, I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage, it was chaos ... I’m not combat trained and that day it was hours of hand-to-hand combat,” she told the committee in gripping testimony.
“It was an absolute war zone.”
The committee also showed footage of officer Brian Sicknick, who ultimately died shortly after the riot. Ms Edwards told the committee that she saw her colleague looking “ghostly pale”.
Even some of the US Capitol Police and DC Metropolitan Police officers who lived through the riot and previously testified at a select committee hearing last year, could be seen shedding tears at the video taken from police body-worn cameras, security cameras, and Mr Quested’s footage.
One of the officers, Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, told The Independent it was “very traumatic to see,” even more than a year removed from the attack.
“I try and keep my composure and you know, not be emotional about it, but it is,” he said. “A year and a half later, I’m in a different state of mind, but it’s still traumatic”.
Some of the officers who responded to the Capitol attack could be seen crying after the video was shown in the hearing.
Trump dismisses Jan 6 hearing
Earlier on Thursday, Mr Trump sought to downplay the panel’s proceedings. In a missive on Truth Social, his personal social network after he was kicked off most mainstream platforms, the former president said the violence on January 6 was “not simply a protest” but actually “the greatest movement” in US history.
Late on Thursday, after the January 6 committee’s hearing concluded, Mr Trump a new statement calling the panel’s members “HACKS”.
“So the Unselect Committee of political HACKS refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements, refuses to talk of the Election Fraud and Irregularities that took place on a massive scale, and decided to use a documentary maker from Fake News ABC to spin only negative footage. Our Country is in such trouble!”
Lawmakers’ emotions are still raw
For those in the room who’d lived through that day, their reactions to the video were immediate and visceral.
Representative Joyce Beatty of Ohio, the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, clutched her throat and stared at the large screen at the front of the room as it displayed the violent images, which were combined with the desperate sounds of contemporaneous police radio transmissions.
As one officer’s transmission recorded him screaming into his microphone, “fall back, fall back,” Ms Beatty sat mouth agape, eyes unblinking.
Ms Bush, who had only been sworn in for her first term three days prior, alternated between shaking her head in disbelief and putting it in her hands as images of police officers being beaten played out on the screen.
And Ms Jayapal appeared even more visibly affected, having to wipe away tears at one point in the presentation.
Asked what was going through her head as she watched the images of the violence from that day, Ms Jayapal told The Independent: “First, incredible anger, then deep sadness, and then disbelief”.
“It was a combination of all of those things, and it’s very viscerally real,” she said.
Another member, Ms Dean, appeared shaken as she spoke to reporters during the brief recess.
Asked if there was anything in the panel’s presentation that was particularly surprising to her, she replied: “There’ll be more and more”.
“I don’t want to say anything tonight. I’m just sad — terribly sad,” she added before walking away.
Representative Sara Jacobs, a freshman congresswoman, told The Independent the presentation was “definitely difficult and traumatic to watch” but said her spirits were buoyed by the presence of her colleagues.
“I’m very grateful that I was sitting in the room with the folks that I was stuck in the gallery with. And we were all going through that together,” she said.
“But no doubt, it brought up a lot of difficult memories. It’s very triggering,” she added.
But it was her freshman colleague Ms Bush who had perhaps the most visceral reaction to the video.
Even several minutes after it had ended, she still appeared distressed when approached by The Independent.
“I’m not ok,” she said before briefly turning away to dry her eyes.
“You know ... I remember looking out the window when they were coming up to the doors, and the sign said ‘Jesus’,” she recalled after turning back.
“These are folks that live in this country, that are from our communities. These are folks that ... come from all walks of life, who have all types of jobs, people like me,” she said, referring to the rioters.
“And these are folks that came to this place to attack this Capitol ... to overturn an election ... by way of force — and not force on chairs, but force on people,” she said. “I’m just I’m weeping on the inside, because this is our country. And I’m weeping on the inside, because it’s not over”.
