WASHINGTON (AP) — An injured officer who slipped in blood and spoke of “carnage.” Video of a huge, violent mob pushing through the U.S. Capitol. Former President Donald Trump’s allies and family members acknowledging his lies.
House investigators worked to lay out a devastating case Thursday in the first of a series of June hearings examining the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. The House panel probing the attack showed violent video of the siege and showed clips of testimony examining the weeks beforehand in which Trump pushed falsehoods about widespread fraud in the election he lost.
While the basics of the attack on the Capitol are well known, the committee is trying to tell the story of how it happened, and how to prevent it from ever happening again, for history. The made-for-TV hearings — including video of police officers being brutally beaten and right-wing extremists leading the crowds into the Capitol — come as some have tried to downplay the violence.
“We can’t sweep what happened under the rug,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the panel, as he opened the hearing. “The American people deserve answers.”
The committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews with people connected to the siege and collected more than 140,000 documents. They will use that evidence over the course of seven hearings this month to show how the attack was coordinated by some of the rioters in the violent mob that broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory — and how Trump’s efforts started it all.
Takeaways from the Jan. 6 committee’s first hearing:
LAYING IT ALL ON TRUMP
Thompson laid out the committee’s initial findings that Trump led a “sprawling, multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election” and the insurrection was a culmination of that “attempted coup.” The panel’s vice chairwoman, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, called it a “sophisticated seven-part plan.”
“The attack on our Capitol was not a spontaneous riot,” said Cheney, one of two Republicans on the nine-member panel.
The hearing featured never-before-seen video testimony from Trump’s family and close aides, many of whom were interviewed by the committee remotely.
The panel started by showing a video interview with former Attorney General Bill Barr, who said he told Trump at the time that his fraud claims had no merit. Barr, who said publicly a month before the insurrection that the Justice Department had not found fraud, told the committee members that he had told Trump it was all “bull——.”
The panel also showed video testimony from Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who spoke to the committee in April. Ivanka Trump told the panel that Barr’s declaration “affected my perspective.”
“I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he said,” she told the committee.
Another Trump adviser, Jason Miller, told the panel that campaign advisors had told the president in “clear terms” that he had lost the election.
‘THIS ISN’T EASY TO WATCH’
The committee showed new, graphic video from the insurrection, moving through a timeline of the violence. It started with rioters angrily walking toward the Capitol, then showed them breaking through thin police barriers and brutally beating police.
