The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will go public with its findings starting this week.
Lawmakers hope to show the American public how democracy came to the brink of disaster. The series of hearings that will take place over the next several weeks begin with a prime-time opener Thursday night in which the nine-member panel plans to give an overview of its 11-month investigation.
The panel has interviewed more than 1,000 people, and only snippets of that testimony have been revealed to the public, mainly through court filings.
The committee includes two Republicans, Reps. Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who opted to stay on despite their party deciding not to cooperate in the probe.
The committee’s members have said they plan to use the prime-time hearings to show a direct link between Trump and efforts to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“The committee found evidence of concerted planning and pre-mediated activity,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat on the committee, told the Washington Post. “The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little bit out of control is absurd. You don't almost knock over the government by accident. So we're going to lay out all of the evidence we've found. People are going to have to make judgments themselves about the relative role that different people played. But I think that Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events.”
As Republicans have decried the committee’s legitimacy, some former White House officials have testified to the committee. The Washington Post reported that among them, Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, spoke with the committee.
