UPDATE: The chairman of the January 6th Committee opened its primetime hearing by laying the blame for the attack on former President Donald Trump and suggesting that it was a pre-planned attempt to subvert democracy.
“Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the committee, said in his opening remarks.
He said that it was “the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt.”
Thompson looked directly at the camera, as he introduced himself to viewers and, recalling his background from his home state, noting that he grew up in an environment where people tried to justify the actions of the KKK. He compared that the the voices trying to “justify the actions of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021.
Thompson’s opener also included a clip of video testimony from former Attorney General William Barr, who told the committee that he told Trump that his claim that the election was stolen was “bullshit.” In another clip, shared by the committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY, Barr said that he told the president that he didn’t see “any evidence of fraud.” In another clip, Ivanka Trump said that she “accepted” what Barr was saying.
Cheney said that Trump “oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”
PREVIOUSLY: The chairman of the January 6th Committee, getting its first primetime moment, plans to start the hearing by warning that “our democracy remains in danger.”
“We can’t sweep what happened under the rug,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), plans to say. “The American people deserve answers.”
Addressing his remarks to the viewing audience, Thompson will say that the hearing, the first of six planned over the next few weeks, will “remind you of the reality of what happened that day. But our work must do much more that just look backwards. Because our democracy remains in danger. The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over.”
Thursday’s event may be less important for the potential bombshells and more as a way to garner the public’s attention again, with the benefit of a high profile time slot and coverage across broadcast and cable news networks, save for Fox News Channel, which has diverted live coverage to their business network. Unlike other committee hearings, which have typically deferred to lawmaker seniority, this hearing was expected to be a greater mix of video segments and witness testimony, with former ABC News president James Goldston enlisted to assist in the presentation.
Some 100 members of the media were credentialed to cover the hearing in person in the Cannon Caucus Room, a stately, chandeliered venue that, according to House history, was the site of the House Un-American Activities hearings. Some House members not on the committee were gathered as spectators, including Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D_WA) and Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN).
The January 6th Committee has held a hearing and public business meetings before, but with public interest potentially fading, there is some pressure on the panel to lay out a narrative of their findings, with the expectation that a share of the blame will be to former President Donald Trump.
Trump’s allies have dismissed the committee itself as a partisan exercise, even though it contains two Republicans, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who have broken with their party orthodoxy, which has been to deny the importance of January 6 — or embrace conspiracy theories over its cause. The former president has been helped out by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who blasted the hearing earlier on Thursday, and the three Fox News primetime hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, whose shows will not be pre-empted despite a major news event. They each were expected to attack and even mock the committee, as they have done in the past, but Hannity and Ingraham have found themselves part of the panel’s investigation. Cheney last year read texts that the Fox personalities sent to then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows as the attack unfolded on January 6, urging him to try to get Trump to try to put a stop to it.
Fox News’ decision to forgo coverage on its main network has drawn harsh criticism from lawmakers and media critics. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took to the Senate floor earlier on Thursday and called Fox News’ decision “cowardly” and one that should “end any debate that they are not a real news organization.”
“Fox News is a propaganda machine of the hard right and it is plain as day that they are scared of their viewers learning the truth about January 6th,” he said, arguing that they have “isolated their viewers in an alternate reality of conspiracy theories.”