WASHINGTON — Nearly a year since its inception, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol will go public with its findings starting this week as lawmakers hope to show the American public how democracy came to the brink of disaster.
The series of hearings that will take place over the next several weeks begin with a prime-time session Thursday night in which the nine-member panel plans to give an overview of its 11-month investigation. More than 1,000 people have been interviewed by the panel, and only snippets of that testimony have been revealed to the public. Here’s what you need to know:
HOW TO WATCH: The first of six hearings is set to go live at 8 p.m. on Thursday. Lawmakers plan to have witnesses testify and to display a series of never-before-seen images and exhibits relating to the lead-up to the insurrection and the attack itself.
ABC, CBS and NBC plan to pre-empt regular entertainment programming for the hearing, and cable news programs are expected to carry the first hearing live in its prime-time slot. The committee is also expected to livestream it on C-SPAN and its YouTube page.
WHO WILL TESTIFY? The select committee has yet to release details about who is expected to testify Thursday. But the public hearing, unlike other committee hearings, will be a mixture of traditional testimony as well as a multimedia presentation, a table-setter for subsequent hearings.
The panel’s probe has so far been divided into a series of focus areas, including the efforts by former President Trump and his allies to cast doubt on the election and halt the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory; the financing and organizing of rallies in Washington that took place before the attack; security failures by Capitol Police and federal agencies; and the actions of the rioters themselves.
NEW REVELATIONS? Members of the committee have promised new and explosive information to arise from the public hearings.
“I am very confident that the committee has both blockbuster information and will also build a compelling narrative of a vast conspiracy started long before January,” said Norman Ornstein, senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute.
“I don’t think the issue is going to be the failure to produce gripping information,” Ornstein said. “It will be whether enough people pay attention, and whether their attention span is such that it will carry over into November and beyond.”
The panel will present previously unseen material documenting the day of the Capitol attack, receive witness testimony, preview additional hearings to come this month and give a summary of what it discovered about what it has dubbed a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power.”
This story contains information from CQ-Roll Call.