WASHINGTON — The ties between allies of former President Donald Trump and the far-right extremists who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is the focus of Tuesday’s hearing by the House committee investigating the insurrection.
Members of the panel are using the seventh public hearing to cover an extended timeline from the Electoral College’s Dec. 14, 2020, meeting to affirm Joe Biden’s win until Jan. 6, 2021, when the electoral vote count in Congress was interrupted by the attack on the Capitol. The committee is expected to present evidence and testimony on the preparations for the insurrection by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, whose members have since been charged with sedition.
Reps. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., will lead questioning of witnesses following opening remarks from Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo. The committee did not release witness names before the hearing, citing concerns about their safety, but several media outlets reported that a former spokesman for the Oath Keepers and a rioter who pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol building will be among those testifying.
The panel will also look at a Dec. 18 White House meeting in which Trump allies tried to convince him to sign an executive order to seize voting machines, and is expected to show how extremist groups took the president’s Dec. 19 announcement of a “wild” rally hours before Congress met to certify the election results as a cue to come to Washington to keep him in power through any means necessary.
That tweet, sent about an hour after the Dec. 18 meeting ended, “electrified and galvanized his supporters, especially the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight against the government,” Raskin said.
While Trump’s efforts to get Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes on Jan. 6 continued, an alliance of extremists coordinated an effort to storm, invade and occupy the Capitol, Raskin said, convincing a large and angry crowd who believed the election had been stolen from them to travel to Washington.
The relationship among the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and QAnon, as well as former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Republican operative Roger Stone will be discussed by the committee, which will also examine what White House staff and advisers knew about the potential for violence and which members of Congress pressured Pence in the days before Jan. 6 to change the election outcome.
Flynn was a major player in the attempt to find evidence of fraud after the election and was being escorted on Jan. 6 by a security detail made up of members of the Oath Keepers, several of whom have been charged for entering the Capitol. Stone had a longstanding relationship with the Proud Boys and helped raise money to put on rallies around Jan. 6.
In her opening remarks, Cheney said that after six hearings, Trump’s allies are pushing a narrative that Trump was poorly served by his outside advisers, including lawyer John Eastman, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa.
“This, of course, is nonsense. Donald Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices,” she said.
Trump had access to more information about election integrity than perhaps anyone else in the country, but chose to push forward with the lie that the election was stolen, Cheney said.
“Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind,” she said.
