Five questions that hang over the Jan. 6 committee’s public hearings
by Niall Stanage - 06/07/22 6:04 PM ET
The biggest moment of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee’s existence is about to arrive.
On Thursday evening, the panel will hold the first of its televised hearings. The event will take place in prime time and be broadcast by almost every major network and news channel.
For some, it will be the most dramatic congressional investigation since the Watergate hearings a half-century ago.
Others — committed supporters of former President Trump, in particular — will likely tune out the hearings.
Here are five big questions that have yet to be answered.
What will we learn that’s new about Trump?
Democrats are promising explosive revelations about the former president’s role in fomenting the attack on the Capitol.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) on Tuesday promised in a CNN interview, “We’re going to see how much Trump was involved. Trump ran this show. He ran it from the time he lost the election in November, and he did it with his son, or sons, and all of his henchmen up there.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, told The Washington Post in a Monday interview that the panel had “found evidence about a lot more than incitement here.”
Raskin added, “I think that Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events. That’s the only way of really making sense of them all.”
Ironically, the main difficulty Democrats may face in making the case against Trump is the vast amount that is already known.
Trump was, after all, impeached by the House only one week after the insurrection, becoming the only president in history to be impeached on two separate occasions.
At a rally at the Ellipse near the White House, immediately before the assault on the Capitol, he told supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And he also told them that President Biden, if certified as the election’s winner, would be an illegitimate president.
There have also been subsequent media leaks about other things the panel may have uncovered — including, recently, the suggestion that Trump was sympathetic to the demands of some of his supporters to “hang Mike Pence,” then the sitting vice president.
There could be more shocking evidence to come. But the knowledge already in existence sets a high
bar.
more
https://thehill.com/news/administration/3515170-five-questions-that-hang-over-the-jan-6-committees-public-hearings/