On Monday morning, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol will hold the second of several public hearings to reveal some of the findings of its 11-month investigation.
The hearing will be broadcast as a CBS News Special Report, hosted by Norah O’Donnell, anchor of “CBS Evening News” and managing editor of CBS News.
John Dickerson, CBS News’ chief political analyst, will be joined by Major Garrett, CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent, Nancy Cordes, Robert Costa, CBS News’ chief election and campaign correspondent, and congressional correspondents Scott MacFarlane and Nikole Killion.
The “Big Lie,” documents how former President Donald Trump declared victory on election night despite being told he didn’t have the numbers to win, and how he continued to embrace baseless claims of election fraud, according to committee aides.
“We’re going to hear testimony from government officials who were on the lookout for the fraud, and how the effort to uncover these baseless allegations yielded no results,” a committee aide said.
“Simply put, the fraud they were looking for didn’t exist, and the former president was repeatedly told that his claims were unfounded, but he kept repeating them anyway.”
Two panels of witnesses will testify at the hearing on Monday. The first panel will feature former Trump campaign manager William Stepien and former Fox News political director Chris Stirewalt, who was fired by Fox News shortly after the 2020 presidential election after his team correctly predicted Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona ahead of other networks.
Former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia BJ Pak, who resigned effective Jan. 4, 2021, and former Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt will make up the second panel.
Some of the witnesses are expected to testify about the fundamentals of election litigation and how it typically proceeds.
According to a committee aide, the committee will also show that between the election and January 6th, Trump campaign aides used election fraud claims to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
Finally, the committee will show that “some of those responsible for the violence on the 6th echoed those very same lies that the former president peddled in the run-up to the insurgency,” according to the aide.
The second hearing will show that “Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had, in fact, lost the election,” said committee vice-chair Rep. Liz Cheney last week.
“However, despite this, President Trump embarked on a massive campaign to disseminate false and fraudulent information to persuade large segments of the American public that fraud had stolen the election from him. “This is not true,” Cheney said at the hearing on Thursday.
The first public hearing, which took place on Thursday, was led by Cheney and committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson.
The committee attempted to link Trump’s unfounded claims of a rigged election to the chaos and violence of January 6, which Thompson described as the “culmination of an attempted coup.”
Some of Trump’s closest allies testified that they told him he didn’t win the election. Thompson played a clip from former Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the committee, in which he said he told former President Barack Obama that his claims of a rigged election were “bullish**.” Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter, said she “trusted” Barr and accepted his assertion that her father had lost the election in another video.
Members of Congress, according to Cheney, have asked Trump for pardons for their roles in the attack.
Cheney named Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry as one of the Republicans, a claim he denied on Friday.
“We’re not going to make accusations or say things without proof or evidence backing it,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, Cheney’s fellow Republican on the committee, said on Sunday on “Face the Nation.”
“There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonour will remain,” Cheney said on Thursday to Republicans who have sided with Trump in the aftermath of the attack.
Two witnesses testified at the first hearing, in addition to the recorded testimony and some never-before-seen footage from Jan. 6: documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was embedded with the Proud Boys at the time of the riot, and Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury on Jan. 6. On January 6, Edwards said he saw a “war scene.”
“It was like something I’d seen in a movie,” Edwards said. “It was impossible for me to believe what I was seeing. On the ground, there were officers.
They were suffocating. They were passing gas. Blood was splattered across the faces of friends. I’d lost my grip.
The Proud Boys’ role in the Jan. 6 attack was also discussed at the hearing. Some members of the group said they believed Trump’s remark during a presidential debate to “stand back and stand by” was a call to action in video testimony shown Thursday.
Quested testified that the Proud Boys were organized and on their way to the Capitol at 10 a.m., well before Trump’s Ellipse speech began.
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Thompson and Cheney wanted to show that Trump did not perform his duties as president while the Capitol was in chaos.
They played a video of Gen. Mark Milley, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifying that former Vice President Pence, not Trump, issued the orders for the National Guard to enter the building.
While Vice President Mike Pence is unlikely to attend the hearings, some of his top advisers are.
In the coming weeks, Greg Jacob, Pence’s former chief counsel, Marc Short, his former chief of staff, and conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig, who advised Pence before Jan. 6, are all expected to testify.
