The Jan. 6 committee of the U.S. House of Representatives will hold its last televised hearing of the summer, a session in prime time that will delve into the 187 minutes that President Donald Trump did not act on the 6th. January 2021 as a Capitol. was attacked.
With live testimony from two former White House aides and excerpts from more than 1,000 interviews, the nearly two-hour session will focus on that three-hour period, after previous hearings heard witnesses about the weeks Trump spent pursuing election fraud claims after the November 3, 2020 vote he lost to Joe Biden
“He didn’t call the military. His secretary of defense didn’t get any orders. He didn’t call his attorney general. He didn’t talk to the Department of Homeland Security,” said panel vice president Liz Cheney, a Republican. of Wyoming. previous hearing.
By delving deeper into the timeline, the panel aims to show what happened between the time Trump left the stage at his “Stop the Steal” rally shortly after 1:10 p.m., January 6, 2021, after to tell the followers to march to the Capitol, and about three hours later, when he issued a video address from the Roser in which he told the mutineers to “go home,” but also praised them as “very specials “.
“The president didn’t do much, but he happily watched television during that time period,” said panelist Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican.
What was Donald Trump doing while the Capitol was under siege? Take a look. pic.twitter.com/9mz3P6C4qK
– @RepKinzinger
The committee also hopes to produce additional evidence about Trump’s confrontation with Secret Service agents who refused to lead him to the Capitol.
Matt Pottinger, who was deputy national security adviser, and Sarah Matthews, then a press aide, are due to appear in person at Thursday night’s hearing. They both resigned on January 6, 2021, after what they saw that day.
This hearing comes a day after a bipartisan group of senators agreed to propose changes to the Electoral Count Act, the post-Civil War law to certify presidential elections that were subjected to intense scrutiny after the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
“No one is above the law”: the US Attorney General
While the Jan. 6 committee cannot prosecute people based on what has been discovered, this week there were further indications that criminal matters are being considered outside its domain.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said Wednesday that the department pledged to be accountable to “anyone criminally responsible for attempting to annul the presidential election,” and described the events ahead and Jan. 6 as the most important investigation. of the department. never undertaken.
Attorney General Merrick Garland spoke briefly with reporters Wednesday in Washington, DC, about the importance of conducting any Jan. 6 investigation carefully. (Oliver Contreras / The Associated Press)
“No one is above the law in this country, I can’t say it more clearly than that,” Garland said, after a reporter asked if his statement applied even to a former president.
No former president has ever been prosecuted federally by the Justice Department. In 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor Richard Nixon before that possibility could be seriously considered, just a month after Nixon resigned for the Watergate crimes.
Meanwhile, the Georgia prosecutor investigating through a special grand jury whether Trump and others illegally interfered in the 2020 general election in this state has informed 16 Republicans who acted as fake voters that they could face charges penalties.
Fulton County District Attorney’s Office attorney Fani Willis said Tuesday in a court statement that each of the 16 people is the target of the investigation after signing a certificate falsely stating that Trump had won the 2020 presidential elections and declared themselves “duly elected and elected by the state”. qualified voters. ”Biden had won the state of Georgia, the battlefield.
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The Jan. 6 committee has raised allegations of witness manipulation by former U.S. President Donald Trump. Republican strategist Rick Wilson shares his views on this new complaint and what has been learned from the hearings so far.
As for the violence and intrusions seen at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, more than 840 people have been charged with federal crimes. More than 330 of them have pleaded guilty, most of them to misdemeanors. Of the more than 200 defendants convicted, approximately 100 have received prison sentences.
No credible allegations of widespread electoral fraud in 2020 were made in dozens of cases that went before the courts and were subsequently dismissed. The Trump administration’s own Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency described the election in a statement as “the safest in U.S. history,” and former Attorney General William Barr, chosen by Trump, has rejected many of the allegations of fraud of the former president and his most loyal defenders.