Watch: House committee conducts first hearing on Jan. 6 attack at US Capitol
Jun 9, 2022, 4:56 PM | Updated: Jun 13, 2022, 9:05 am
Nearly a year since its inception, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will go public with its findings starting Thursday night as 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 session Thursday night in which the nine-member panel plans to give an overview of its 11-month investigation.
More than 1,000 people have been interviewed by the panel, and only snippets of that testimony have been revealed to the public, mostly through court filings.
Thursday’s prime-time hearing will open with eyewitness testimony from the first police officer pummeled in the mob riot and from a documentary filmmaker tracking the extremist Proud Boys, who prepared to fight for former president Donald Trump immediately after the election, and led the storming of the Capitol.
It will also feature the committee’s accounts from Trump’s aides and family members, interviewed behind closed doors, of the deadly siege that Democrats and others say put U.S. democracy at risk.
British filmmaker Nick Quested, who recorded members of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group as they stormed the building, and Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer who was seriously injured in the attack, will be among the witnesses.
In subsequent hearings, the committee has reached out to a group of Trump-era Justice Department officials, including Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general at the time of the riot, about having them as witnesses, according to a person familiar with the matter who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
