The Jan. 6 committee’s ninth and likely final investigative hearing Thursday will feature new testimony and evidence, including Secret Service records and surveillance video.
The hearing, set for 1 p.m. ET, will not include any live witnesses, a committee aide said. And unlike earlier hearings that focused on a specific aspect of the GOP plot to overturn the 2020 election and keep then-President Donald Trump in power, Thursday’s presentation will take a more sweeping view of what happened before, during and after the Jan. 6 attack.
“Tomorrow, what we’re going to be doing is taking a step back and we’re going to be looking at that entire plan, the entire multipart plan to overturn the election. We’re going to be looking at it in a broader context and in a broader timeline as well,” a committee aide said on a conference call with reporters on Wednesday.
“We’re going to bring a particular focus on the former president’s state of mind and his involvement in these events as they unfolded,” the aide added. “What you’re going to see is a synthesis of some evidence we’ve already presented with that new, never-before-seen information to illustrate Donald Trump’s centrality to the scheme from the time prior to the election.”
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The committee aide confirmed that the Thursday hearing will feature new testimony from witnesses who have appeared during past hearings, as well as from some who have not been seen before.
Some new information from a trove of Secret Service records — including more than 1 million electronic communications sent by agents in the lead-up to and during the insurrection — will be revealed in the hearing, an aide confirmed. Since the panel’s last hearing at the end of July, the committee also conducted interviews with new high-profile witnesses, including former Trump Cabinet members Mike Pompeo and Elaine Chao; their testimony could be featured Thursday as well, though aides would not name names.
The aide would not confirm that those tuning in Thursday would see testimony from Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Virginia Thomas was interviewed by the Jan. 6 panel on Sept. 29, where, Chair Bennie Thompson said, she continued to insist that the 2020 election was stolen.
Unlike many other committee interviews and depositions, Thomas’ was not videotaped due to an agreement with her, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., recently said on MSNBC. But transcripts and quotes from Thomas may still be used on Thursday, Lofgren said.
All nine committee members are expected to lead segments of the hearing. That’s a departure from this summer when each of the eight hearings featured only a few panel members at a time.
Part of the committee’s charge is to issue legislative recommendations to prevent another Jan. 6 attack, and some panel members Thursday will present on the ongoing threats to democracy that remain.
The panel could hold another hearing when it rolls out its final report by the end of the year, but Thursday’s televised meeting will be its last before the Nov. 8 midterm elections as the committee moves to wrap up its historic and sprawling investigation, launched 16 months ago.
The Jan. 6 committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews and depositions, received 10,000 submissions to the panel’s tip line and obtained countless documents and other Jan. 6 records.
As part of its multimedia presentation Thursday, the panel is also expected to showcase video clips of Roger Stone — the GOP strategist and Trump confidant — from “A Storm Foretold,” a documentary that tracked Stone ahead of the Jan. 6 attack.
“We plan to present what we found out working through this summer,” Lofgren said on MSNBC. “I think it will shed some light on the events of [Jan. 6] and the events leading up to it, the connections between the extremists and the Republicans.”
“When I think back, this is really much worse than I expected when we started this,” the congresswoman continued. “We all knew that the president had summoned the mob and whipped them up and sent them off to the Capitol, but some of the other things we’ve discovered are really worse than I imagined.”
Kyle Stewart contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
