Chairman: Jan. 6 Capitol riot hearings to stretch into July
WASHINGTON — The House’s Jan. 6 committee plans to continue its public hearings into July as its investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot deepens.
The chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters Wednesday that the committee is receiving “a lot of information” — including new documentary film footage of Donald Trump’s final months in office — as its yearlong inquiry intensifies with hearings into the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that Democrat Joe Biden won.
Thompson said the committee’s Thursday hearing, which is set to highlight former Justice Department officials testifying about Trump’s proposals to reject the election results, would wrap up this month’s work. The committee would start up again in July.
“We have a new documentary from a person that we’re talking to, and we got to look through all his information,” Thompson said, referring to British filmmaker Alex Holder whose never-before-seen interviews with the former president and his inner circle were turned over to the committee this week.
For the past year, the committee has been investigating the violence at the Capitol and its causes, and has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and produced some 140,000 documents. Nine people died in the attack and its aftermath.
The committee had been scheduled to conclude this first round of public hearings in June. But additional information has come to the committee’s attention, and Congress is set to recess for two weeks of remote and district work into the Fourth of July holiday.
The revelation about the film came to light Tuesday when Holder revealed he had complied with a congressional subpoena to turn over all of the footage he shot in the final weeks of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.
“When we began this project in September 2020, we could have never predicted that our work would one day be subpoenaed by Congress,” Holder wrote in a statement Tuesday on Twitter.
The filmmaker said the footage includes exclusive interviews with Trump, his children and then-Vice President Mike Pence while on the campaign trail as well as before and after the insurrection took place at the Capitol.
In his statement on Twitter, Holder wrote that “we simply wanted to understand who the Trumps were and what motivated them to hold onto power so desperately.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., indicated Tuesday that the investigation’s schedule may be changing.
“I would just say the original hearings would have wrapped up in June, but we are picking up new evidence on a daily basis with enormous velocity,” Raskin said. “And so we’re constantly incorporating and including the new information that’s coming out.”
He added: “But certainly the hearings will conclude before the end of the summer.”