The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans to return to prime time Thursday to hold a closing argument in the case it brought against former President Donald J. Trump, which involved the former commander in chief is charged with negligence for failing to call off the attack carried out in his name.
To do this, the panel will place two military veterans — Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois — central to leading the presentation and questioning.
Ms. Luria, the only Democrat on the panel to be involved in a competitive reelection race, served in the Navy for more than 20 years, reaching the rank of Commander. Mr. Kinzinger is an Air Force veteran who has flown missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the witnesses they intend to personally question, Matthew Pottinger, who served as Deputy National Security Adviser under Mr Trump and the top White House official who resigned on January 6, 2021, is a veteran of the Marine Corps.
In an interview ahead of the hearing, scheduled for July 21, 8:00 p.m., Ms. Luria said the panel planned to document in detail how Mr Trump did nothing for more than three hours as his supporters stormed the Capitol. , involving ethical, moral and legal questions surrounding the former president.
“The captain of a ship cannot sit there and watch the ship burn to the waterline and do nothing to stop it,” Ms Luria said, referring to her experience in the Navy, where she worked on nuclear reactors. “And that’s exactly what he did.”
Key Revelations from the January 6 Hearings
Ms. Luria said the panel planned to elicit personal accounts of what happened in the West Wing on Jan. 6 from Mr. Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, a former White House press officer who had resigned in the wake of the riot. It also plans to play recorded testimony from former White House attorney Pat A. Cipollone and others to document Mr Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6.
“We have reports from people who have observed him,” Ms Luria said. “There was no concern, anger, fear. He wasn’t shocked.”
The commission plans to show that Mr. Trump had the power to blow off the crowd, but refused to do so until after 4 p.m. that day — and then only after hundreds of officers at the Capitol responded to call off the blindsided Capitol Police. and had begun to turn the tide against the crowd and make it clear that the siege would fail, committee officials said.
The panel also plans to show outtakes from Trump’s Jan. 7 video comments, in which he struggled to condemn the violence and promise a peaceful transfer of power, according to a person familiar with the commission’s plans. Plans to show the outtakes were previously reported by The Washington Post.
Representative Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat and committee chair, plans to chair the remote hearing after testing positive for Covid-19 this week.
The panel has already begun detailing some of his evidence of Mr Trump’s inaction. Ms. Matthews told the committee that a tweet Mr Trump sent to attacking Vice President Mike Pence while the riots were underway was like “pouring gasoline on the fire”.
Mr. Trump had unsuccessfully tried to pressure Mr. Pence, who was in the Capitol when rioters broke through the building chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” to reject the official Congressional vote count to elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the President-elect to confirm.
Both Mr. Pottinger and Ms. Matthews have cited that tweet as contributing to their desire to leave the White House.
“These were people who believed in the work of the administration, but on this day, when faced with the circumstances, the inaction of the President and some of the statements he made, they decided they were done, that they would resign,” said Mrs. said Luria. “That’s very powerful when you hear directly from them.”
The commission has also said it has received testimony from Keith Kellogg, a retired lieutenant general who was Pence’s national security adviser. He told the panel that Mr Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump had urged her father to call off the violence at least twice, as had Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, and Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary.
The panel also released text messages from Fox News hosts, including Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, and Donald Trump Jr., one of the president’s sons, urging him to do more to end the violence that day.
“Everyone who came into contact with him that day and everyone who had access to him from what they shared with the committee made some effort to try and get him to do more,” Ms Luria said.
At each of its hearings this summer, the panel has presented evidence that lawmakers and aides believe could be used to bolster a criminal case against Mr Trump. The commission has uncovered new details that they believe may provide evidence of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and Mr Trump’s own donors; revelations about his plan to submit false voter rolls that could lead to allegations of filing false documents with the government; and revelations about his plot to disrupt the electoral count on Capitol Hill that suggest he could face charges for obstructing official Congressional proceedings.
While there are penalties for members of the military who are neglected in their duties, Ms Luria said she was unsure that Mr Trump could be charged with a criminal offense as a result of his inaction.
Still, she said Thursday’s hearing was expected to be a capstone in a series of hearings in June and July in which the panel set out its preliminary findings from more than 1,000 interviews.
The panel is expected to continue its investigation and supplement its work pending the publication of a preliminary report in September. The committee could also convene more public hearings, members said.
