The January 6 committee returned to primetime on Thursday night, as the House panel investigating the Capitol insurrection held its eighth and final – for now, at least – public hearing.
Like the first hearing, Thursday’s event took place in the evening, as the panel sought to capture the widest possible audience for its presentation. The first hearing, which was held last month, was watched by at least 20 million people.
The eighth hearing set out to detail the 187 minutes that passed from the end of Donald Trump’s speech to supporters on January 6 until he finally told insurrectionists to “go home”. In the intervening three-plus hours, a mass of Trump’s more extreme supporters overran the US Capitol in a vain attempt to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 presidential election. The violence at the Capitol left several people dead.
Democrat Elaine Luria, who was chosen to co-lead the Thursday hearing with fellow panel member and Republican Adam Kinzinger, said the committee would show how Trump refused pleas from his advisers and family members to call off the mob. Instead, Luria said, Trump “sat in his dining room and watched the attack on television”.
“For hours, Donald Trump chose not to answer the pleas from Congress, from his own party, and from all across our nation to do what his oath required,” said Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair of the committee. “He refused to defend our nation and our constitution. He refused to do what every American president must.”
Kinzinger said Trump violated his oath of office during the attack.
“Our hearings have shown many ways in which President Trump tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power in the days leading up to January 6, with each step of his plan, and betrayed his oath of office, and was derelict in his duty,” Kinzinger said in his opening remarks.
One central committee member, Democratic chair Bennie Thompson, did not attend the hearing in person. Thompson tested positive for coronavirus on Monday, but chaired the hearing remotely.
Two former Trump White House aides who resigned shortly after January 6, Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, appeared before the committee to testify on Thursday.
Pottinger served in the Trump administration for four years and resigned as a deputy national security adviser, while Matthews was a White House press aide.
When she announced her resignation last year, Matthews expressed dismay about the events of January 6, and she has continued to criticize Trump.
After former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson appeared before the select committee last month, Matthews came to her defense, even as some of Trump’s allies dismissed the shocking testimony as “hearsay”.
“Anyone downplaying Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t understand how the Trump [White House] worked or is attempting to discredit her because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is,” Matthews said on Twitter at the time.
Anyone downplaying Cassidy Hutchinson’s role or her access in the West Wing either doesn’t understand how the Trump WH worked or is attempting to discredit her because they’re scared of how damning this testimony is.
— Sarah Matthews (@SarahAMatthews1) June 28, 2022
Hutchinson’s testimony was expected to feature prominently in the Thursday hearing. In her appearance before the committee, Hutchinson, a former adviser to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, painted a damning picture of an increasingly chaotic White House led by a president determined to hold on to power, even after he was repeatedly told he had fairly lost the election, including by his own attorney general, William Barr.
According to Hutchinson, Trump was aware that some of his supporters were armed on January 6, yet he still encouraged them to march to the Capitol after he spoke at a rally near the White House.
Hutchinson also provided a secondhand account of Trump grabbing for the steering wheel of a vehicle in a desperate attempt to go to the Capitol with his supporters, having said at the rally “I’ll be there with you”. Instead he returned to the White House.
Some of Hutchinson’s testimony relied on comments she heard from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel. Cipollone privately spoke to the January 6 investigators shortly after Hutchinson testified, and the committee was expected to show more of his interview during the Thursday hearing.
The committee had also hoped to gather more information from the US Secret Service before the Thursday hearing, about Trump and Pence’s movements on the day, but that effort is proving far more difficult than anticipated. After receiving a subpoena for all agency communications on January 5 and 6, the Secret Service turned over just one text message to the select committee, an aide to the panel confirmed.
The committee has promised to continue collecting information from important witnesses as it works to compile a comprehensive report on the Capitol attack by this fall, and Thompson confirmed Thursday that the panel would hold additional hearings in September.
“But as that work goes forward, a number of facts are clear. There can be no doubt that there was a coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn an election, overseen and directed by Donald Trump,” Thompson said. “These facts have gone undisputed. And so there needs to be accountability.”
