Washington, D.C. – The United States congressional probe of the January 6 attack on the Capitol by Donald Trump supporters wraps up its summer hearings on Thursday with a prime-time presentation focussed on the former president’s actions during the three hours of rage after his raucous speech that day.
The hearing will detail both the scenes of violence that played out as Trump supporters fought their way into the Capitol and Trump’s actions in the 187 minutes between his speech urging the crowd to “fight like hell” and the final release of a video urging rioters to go home.
Ahead of the hearing, Republican representative Adam Kinzinger released a video on Twitter in which former White House aides and officials described Trump watching television footage of the crowds that stormed the Capitol in a private dining room at the White House.
“To the best of my recollection, he was always in the dining room,” former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said in the clip, which also showed former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone saying footage of the riot was visible on the screen.
Scheduled at 8 p.m. East Caribbean Time on Friday to reach a broad television audience, the public hearing is expected to be the last eight the House of Representatives Select Committee has held since mid-June.
The panel of seven Democratic and two Republican House members has been investigating the attack on the Capitol for the past year, interviewing more than 1 000 witnesses and amassing tens of thousands of documents.
It used the hearings to build a case that Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election constitute illegal conduct, far beyond normal politics.
The Washington Post reported that the committee could show out-takes from Trump’s effort to record a video the day after the riot.
The newspaper said Trump resisted holding the rioters to account, to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over.
Spokespeople for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reuters)
