Jan 6 panel to focus on Trump’s actions during Capitol attack

Legislators say the next public hearing will present a minute-by-minute look at Trump’s activities.

Police video camera stills of January 6 clashes shown at Capitol riot hearing on June 9, 2022.

The US congressional committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021 will present a minute-by-minute look this week at Donald Trump’s activities as the Capitol was attacked.

“He was doing nothing to actually stop the riot,” Democrat representative Elaine Luria told CNN overnight Sunday.

“The president didn’t do very much but gleefully watch television,” Republican representative Adam Kinzinger told CBS.

Mr Kinzinger also expressed frustration at what he called “very conflicting statements” about the availability of evidence the committee has sought from the US Secret Service, which includes text messages from January 6 and the preceding day.

He said the inspector-general who acts as a watchdog over the Secret Service reported that many texts from those two days were erased after he had requested them for his own investigation. The Secret Service in a statement last Thursday said data were lost from some phones during a technology change that had been previously planned, but that it didn’t lose any texts the inspector-general had sought for his January 6 review.

The House of Representatives committee issued a subpoena to the agency on Friday, requesting information about the text messages by Tuesday.

“They said we’ll meet this deadline, and we’ll see what we get here,” Mr Kinzinger said. “In the very least, it is quite crazy that the Secret Service would actually end up deleting anything related to one of the more infamous days in American history, particularly when it comes to the role of the Secret Service.”

The committee has been piecing together Mr Trump’s actions the afternoon of January 6 as his supporters broke into the Capitol in a bid to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 election win. Its focus in its hearing on Thursday (Friday AEST) will be on a 187-minute period that culminated in a 4.17pm video by Mr Trump in which he asked rioters, whom he called “very special”, to leave the Capitol.

Ms Luria on Sunday said the hearing will include witnesses the public hasn’t yet heard from, but she didn’t give details.

Many Republicans have been critical of the committee’s work, calling it a partisan effort to undermine Mr Trump.

The Secret Service has become a focus of the panel following testimony last month by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Ms Hutchinson testified that she had been told Mr Trump was so intent on being driven to the Capitol after his “Stop the steal rally” in Washington that he lunged toward a Secret Service official in his presidential vehicle and grabbed for the steering wheel.

The Secret Service rejected any suggestion of wrongdoing. Spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said the agency began a pre-planned effort in January 2021 to reset mobile phones to factory settings, which it said began a month before the inspector-general requested electronic communications in February 2021. Some phones’ data were lost during that process, it said.

Mr Guglielmi on Sunday reiterated that the service has been co-operating with the inspector-general. The agency said Thursday it has provided to the inspector-general hundreds of thousands of emails and other messages by Secret Service employees related to the preparation for and events of January 6. He also said it was willing to make available anyone the committee wanted to question.

Thursday’s prime-time hearing is the eighth and final one in a series planned by the committee. However, committee members said the investigation was continuing and more hearings could follow. “New witnesses are coming forward. Additional information is coming forward,” Democrat representative Zoe Lofgren told ABC. “There are things that we are looking at still.”

The panel comprises seven Democrats and two Republicans, Mr Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, who have both been critical of the former president and other GOP leaders for their response to the attack.

The Wall Street Journal