WASHINGTON — The Jan. 6 commission will hold a last minute public hearing on Tuesday to present new evidence and hear witness statements, after previously saying it would take a hiatus until mid-July.
The hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET, according to an advisory the committee sent Monday. In an unusual move, the commission failed to identify the witness, as in previous hearings.
“New evidence is coming [the committee’s] receive almost daily attention,” said a source familiar with the hearing. The committee had planned to work this week in preparation for the final two hearings, so this is not planned.
“You can infer from that that there will be a lot of meaning to the hearing.”
Monday’s announcement came as a surprise, as chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and assistants to the Jan. 6 panel said last week that there would be no other public hearings in June and that the next set of hearings would take place when The Congress is returning from its four-week July recess, sometime in mid-July.
Two hearings were originally scheduled for this week, but they were postponed, panelists said, to give the committee more time to prepare and as the panel receives more information.
“The next few hearings will cover the build-up to Jan. 6, the bringing together of this mob that showed up at the mall that day, and the attack on the Capitol,” D-Calif Representative Adam Schiff, a panelist, said. Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“The final hearing will be about what the president was doing and, more importantly, what he wasn’t doing when we were attacked,” he said. “In short, the President’s blatant dereliction of duty while the Capitol was under attack.”
The House’s nine-member selection committee has already held five hearings this month on issues including then-President Donald Trump’s campaign to pressure his Vice President, Mike Pence, on Justice Department officials, and on state and local officials.
In past hearings, the panel has shown live and recorded testimony from then-Attorney General Bill Barr and other top Trump White House officials, administration and campaign officials who described how Trump and a handful of his allies aggressively pursued a plot to get the certification. of Joe Biden’s statement. victory in several major swing states and undoing the 2020 elections.
During Thursday’s hearing, a trio of former top Justice officials spoke of a dramatic Oval Office meeting with Trump, where they threatened to resign if he appointed Jeffrey Clark, who was willing to investigate Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud, to DOJ to lead.
“I said, ‘Mr. President, you’re talking about putting a man in that chair who has never tried a criminal case, who has never conducted a criminal investigation. He tells you he will take charge of the department – 115,000 employees, including the entire FBI — and will run the case on a budget and conduct nationwide criminal investigations that will yield results within days,” Richard Donoghue, former acting actor for Trump’s deputy attorney general, testified.
“’It’s impossible. It’s absurd. It’s not going to happen and it’s going to fail.’”
