LIGHT, CAMERAS, RIOT PROBE ACTION
Congressional Jan. 6 investigative panel to hold live televised hearing Thurs. at 8 p.m.
The House panel that has spent almost a year probing the deadly Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol is set to take its work to TV on Thursday night in the investigation’s first primetime hearing.
The spectacle, scheduled for Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern time, arrives amid a cacophony of news cycles, with many Americans focused on gun violence, inflation and the possible end of national abortion protections. Memories of the stunning attack spurred by then-President Donald Trump have faded.
But the U.S. also is rolling into a midterm election season framed by whispers that Trump may soon announce a 2024 White House run, perhaps as early as this summer.
The challenge for the committee, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, may simply be getting Americans — taxed by Trump fatigue — to tune in Thursday.
The hearing, the first of six, is expected to be widely broadcast and carefully choreographed. James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, has taken on an advisory role to add polish to the production, Axios reported Monday.
Goldston did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday. He left his post at ABC News last year.
Trump, sowing lies of a stolen election, delivered a speech on the Mall on Jan. 6, 2021, ahead of the attack. He urged his followers to “take back our country,” and they went on to blitz the Capitol, busting past barricades, menacing cops and sending lawmakers scrambling.
A federal judge in California ruled in March that Trump likely committed a crime in his attempts to derail the vote certification of President Biden’s 2020 victory, ordering a Trump ally to provide emails to the House panel.
The committee said in a notice that Thursday’s hearing at the Cannon House Office Building will include testimony from witnesses and “unseen material” documenting the siege, and offer an “initial summary” of the probe’s findings.
The notice described the insurrection as a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power.”
Here are some key details about the hearing.
HOW TO WATCH
TV networks including CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC are expected to broadcast the hearing, and the panel is also set to stream it on YouTube.
Fox News, however, is not expected to air the hearing in full. In a Monday statement, the network said its “primetime programs will cover the hearings as news warrants.”
But coverage of the hearing will appear live on FOX Business Network and foxnews.com, Fox News said.
Laura Ingraham, a conservative Fox News anchor, said Tuesday: “We actually do something called cater to our audience. Our audience knows what this is.”
“We’ll cover it, and we’ll do plenty of coverage,” Ingraham said. “But it’s a theater, total theater.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) charged that Fox News’ broadcast plan represented “one of the most cowardly journalistic decisions in modern memory.”
“It is beyond repugnant that Fox News refuses to cover an investigation into the deadliest attack on our democracy in modern history,” Schumer said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “It is a disgusting and treacherous decision, one that will gravely harm our democracy.”
WHO WILL TESTIFY
The hearing is to include testimony from a Capitol Police officer, Caroline Edwards, who was wounded in the attack, and a filmmaker, Nick Quested, who documented the siege.
Edwards endured a traumatic brain injury during the Capitol riot, according to the panel, but
carried on patrolling the West Plaza despite her wound.
WHAT LAWMAKERS ARE SAYING
While Democrats have spun the hearing as a landmark event that will cast fresh light on a dark moment in American democracy, some Republicans have taken a nothing-to-see-here line.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) tweeted Monday that Democrats are using “taxpayer money on a TV producer for the prime time political infomercial from the Jan 6th circus.”
And Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican, said Wednesday that the probe “is not about seeking the truth — it’s a smear campaign against President Donald Trump, against Republican members of Congress and against Trump voters across this country.”
“It is designed to punish Nancy Pelosi’s political opponents, and it will not prevent another Jan. 6 from happening,” Stefanik said at a news conference, referring to the Democratic House speaker.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the committee, said the panel wants to “counter the continuing propagation of big lies.”
“Our goal is to present the narrative of what happened in this country — how close we came to losing our democracy,” he told CBS News in an interview aired Sunday.
“The American people, I think, know a great deal already,” Schiff added. “They’ve seen a number of bombshells already. There’s a great deal they haven’t seen.”