By Ted Johnson , Dominic Patten
UPDATE: The impact of the January 6th Committee hearing was probably felt more in the Cannon Caucus Room than outside of it: As an extended video was played of the attack, it was particularly wrenching for the lawmakers, law enforcement and members of the media who were there that day and witnessed it.
But the hearing itself went by rather briskly relative to other congressional events, as the committee seemed to want to give a taste of their case ahead — that Trump is to blame for what happened on January 6th. The bits of revelation were like teasers of the topics for the hearings ahead.
“What happened on January 6th is kind of the end of the story, but really the root of it is that Trump was determined to stay in power, regardless of the election,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said afterward.
Related Story How To Watch The January 6 Hearings: Livestream Link, Scheduled Dates & Who'll Be Testifying
As the committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) put it, “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame.”
Committee members promised new revelations, and there were some.
Among those that stood out:
What Trump said about Pence: According to Cheney, when Trump saw rioters chanting to “hang Mike Pence,” he said, “Maybe our supporters have the riot idea. Mike Pence deserves it.”
What Mark Milley said about Mark Meadows: On January 6, as the attack unfolded, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley spoke with Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, who told him, in effect, “We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative, you know, that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable.”
What Ivanka Trump said about her father’s election claims: After Attorney General William Barr said that there was no evidence of widespread election fraud, Trump’s daughter told the committee in video testimony, “It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
What Jared Kushner thought of the White House counsel threatening to resign: Trump’s son in law and adviser Jared Kusher was asked in video testimony whether he was aware of instances where White House Counsel Pat Cipollone threatened to resign. But Kushner tried to distance himself to what was going on in the Trump circle post-election, saying that he was focused on pardons and that he took Cipollone’s threats as “just whining.”
Members of congress sought pardons: Cheney said that Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) sought a presidential pardon for his role in trying to reverse the election results. ” Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election,” Cheney said, giving a preview of more to come.
PREVIOUSLY: The January 6th Committee’s hearing concluded with the videotaped testimony of Trump supporters who trekked to Washington, D.C. on January 6th, answering his call to show up in the capital on that day.
“He said, ‘I have something important to say,'” Matthew Walker said in one of the clips. Another supporter said, “He laid out what is happening in our government.”
Their words were a bit of a teaser for the next hearing, as the committee will try to establish that Trump was the one who motivated his supporters to turn out at the Capitol for an “attempted coup.”
PREVIOUSLY: Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker who was following the Proud Boys on January 6th, testified that they attended Trump’s speech at the Ellipse that day but he was “confused” when they left it early to go to the Capitol.
That is important as the committee tried to make the case that the siege on the Capitol was pre-planned, and that groups like the Proud Boys scoped out security at the Capitol to seek out weak spots where barricades could be breached.
“For anyone who didn’t understand how violent that event was, I saw it, I documented it, and I experienced it,” Quested said.
Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards described trying to fend off the mob. As it grew, she said that she made the “understatement of the century” to her sergeant. “Sarge, I think we’re going to need a few more people down here.”
She, like other officers that day, described scenes of carnage and chaos.
“It was just hours of hand to hand combat,” she said.
“I saw friends with blood all over their faces,” she said. “I was slipping in people’s blood. You know, I was catching people as they fell.” She described the attack as more of a “battle” than a riot.
Edwards was injured when she was struck on the top of her head by a bike rack and she stumbled on some concrete stairs. Her chin hit a rail and her head struck the stairs, knocking her unconsciousness. When she came to, she returned to try to help the other officers. One of those she saw was Officer Brian Sicknick, and he was “ghostly pale.” He died the next day of a stroke. His mother was in the hearing room, along with other members of law enforcement, including Aquilino Gonell and Harry Dunn, both of whom testified at a committee hearing last year. Dunn had a T-shirt with the definition of the word “insurrection” on it.
At one moment, she said looked out over the Capitol grounds and recalled “just seeing the war zone that the west front had become.”
PREVIOUSLY: The January 6th Committee presented an extended, graphic video of the attack on the Capitol, including footage not seen before, intended to show the magnitude of the siege, chaos and the violence.
Included in the video were officers calling for help as the rioters began to surge forward and break through barricades.
The footage also include excerpts from Donald Trump’s rally at the Ellipse that preceded the attack, as he told his supporters, “Mike Pence, I hope you are going to stand up for the good of our Constitution and for the good of our country.” The committee is trying to show how Trump incited the attack.
pic.twitter.com/Po7qA3xecf
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022
The footage also highlighted the role of the Proud Boys, the far-right, neofascist group whose members were part of the attack.
Among those in the gallery in the hearing room was Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO), who fought back tears as she watched the footage, having escaped the House chamber that day. “It was difficult to watch,” she told reporters. “It’s not a movie. It’s not like something that happened in a different country that is removed from us. These folks (the rioters) are from our communities.”
PREVIOUSLY: The chairman of the January 6th Committee opened its primetime hearing by laying the blame for the attack on former President Donald Trump and suggesting that it was a pre-planned attempt to subvert democracy.
“Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks.
He said that it was “the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt.”
Thompson looked directly at the camera, as he introduced himself to viewers and, recalling his background from his home state, noting that he grew up in an environment where people tried to justify the actions of the KKK. He compared that the the voices trying to “justify the actions of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021.
Thompson’s opener also included a clip of video testimony from former Attorney General William Barr, who told the committee that he told Trump that his claim that the election was stolen was “bullshit.” In another clip, shared by the committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY, Barr said that he told the president that he didn’t see “any evidence of fraud.” In another clip, Ivanka Trump said that she “accepted” what Barr was saying. In the hearing room, the clips were played on a large screen above the committee members.
Cheney said that Trump “oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”
She also said that Trump, reacting to January 6th rioters calls to “hang” Mike Pence, said in private, “Maybe our supporters have the riot idea. Mike Pence deserves it.”
Cheney also put Trump’s actions in historical context, noting that Trump was the first president in history to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.
PREVIOUSLY: The chairman of the January 6th Committee, getting its first primetime moment, plans to start the hearing by warning that “our democracy remains in danger.”
“We can’t sweep what happened under the rug,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), plans to say. “The American people deserve answers.”
Addressing his remarks to the viewing audience, Thompson will say that the hearing, the first of six planned over the next few weeks, will “remind you of the reality of what happened that day. But our work must do much more that just look backwards. Because our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over.”
Thursday’s event may be less important for the potential bombshells and more as a way to garner the public’s attention again, with the benefit of a high profile time slot and coverage across broadcast and cable news networks, save for Fox News Channel, which has diverted live coverage to their business network. Unlike other committee hearings, which have typically deferred to lawmaker seniority, this hearing was expected to be a greater mix of video segments and witness testimony, with former ABC News president James Goldston enlisted to assist in the presentation.
Some 100 members of the media were credentialed to cover the hearing in person in the Cannon Caucus Room, a stately, chandeliered venue that, according to House history, was the site of the House Un-American Activities hearings. Some House members not on the committee were gathered as spectators, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D_WA) and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN).
The January 6th Committee has held a hearing and public business meetings before, but with public interest potentially fading, there is some pressure on the panel to lay out a narrative of their findings, with the expectation that a share of the blame will be to former President Donald Trump.
Trump’s allies have dismissed the committee itself as a partisan exercise, even though it contains two Republicans, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who have broken with their party orthodoxy, which has been to deny the importance of January 6 — or embrace conspiracy theories over its cause. The former president has been helped out by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who blasted the hearing earlier on Thursday, and the three Fox News primetime hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, whose shows will not be pre-empted despite a major news event. They each were expected to attack and even mock the committee, as they have done in the past, but Hannity and Ingraham have found themselves part of the panel’s investigation. Cheney last year read texts that the Fox personalities sent to then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as the attack unfolded on January 6, urging him to try to get Trump to try to put a stop to it.
Fox News’ decision to forgo coverage on its main network has drawn harsh criticism from lawmakers and media critics. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor earlier on Thursday and called Fox News’ decision “cowardly” and one that should “end any debate that they are not a real news organization.”
“Fox News is a propaganda machine of the hard right and it is plain as day that they are scared of their viewers learning the truth about January 6th,” he said, arguing that they have “isolated their viewers in an alternate reality of conspiracy theories.”
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