WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump was “personally and substantially involved” in every aspect of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election — including the attack on the Capitol — House Jan. 6 Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said Thursday.
“The vast weight of evidence presented so far has shown us that the central cause of January 6th was one man, Donald Trump, who many others followed,” Cheney said at the start of the panel’s ninth public hearing. “None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it.”
The committee planned to give the public a closer look at Trump’s thinking and actions as he tried to cling to power following his defeat in the 2020 election — and to begin to close its case that he led an insurrection.
“We’re going to bring a focus, particular focus, on the former president’s state of mind and his involvement in these events as they unfolded,” a committee aide said prior to the hearing’s start. “What you’re going to see is a synthesis of some evidence we’ve already presented with … never-before-seen information to illustrate Donald Trump’s centrality to the scheme from the time prior to the election.”
Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., described the evidence the committee had gathering as answering a series of questions: “What did President Trump know? What was he told? What was his personal and substantial role in the multi-part plan to overturn the election?
This hearing, possibly the committee’s last public meeting, comes after a nearly two-month hiatus during which the criminal trials for Jan. 6 rioters — including a set charged with seditious conspiracy — continued in federal court, the FBI seized a raft of documents from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, and Cheney lost her re-election primary.
In that time, the panel has interviewed witnesses behind closed doors, including conservative activist Ginni Thomas, the deeply-connected wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. Ginni Thomas, who advocated for Trump to remain in power, embraces the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.
“What’s really kind of interesting is that we keep getting additional information, and I think this hearing allows us to go a little deeper into what people knew, when they knew it, and what decisions they made based on that information,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., a member of the committee, said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” hours before the hearing.
At the same time, the panel has suggested it is preparing to place new details into the existing architecture of the argument it has been building for months. The lawmakers — seven Democrats and two Republicans — already presented evidence that Trump and his closest allies pursued every available means to keep him in office despite his defeat, an effort they say culminated with the Capitol riot.
“What we’re going to be doing is taking a step back,” the aide said of Thursday’s hearing. “We’re going to be looking at that entire plan, the entire multi-part plan, to overturn the election.”
Already, they have heard testimony from police who were beaten by rioters at the Capitol, Trump White House officials and people with knowledge of a plot to install “fake electors” to reverse the results of the 2020 election.
The panel is working under a time crunch as it gathers and publicizes evidence prior to issuing a final report. If Republicans win control of the House in November’s elections, as most prognosticators predict, the committee will be disbanded in January. That means panel members must be ready to wrap their work by the end of this year.
As it has done at previous hearings, the panel will show testimony from pre-recorded interviews Thursday. But it is not expected to hear from any live witnesses in the room.
Thompson noted that in interviewing many Trump White House and administration officials, a group that includes members of the former president’s family, it was GOP sources who proved most crucial to the probe.
“When you look back at what has come out through this Committee’s work, the most striking fact is that all this evidence comes almost entirely from Republicans,” Thompson said.
Haley Talbot contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
