Ahead of the Jan. 6 Select Committee’s first public hearing on Thursday, panel member Jamie Raskin (D-MD) offered a preview of what the public can expect the committee to share about the events surrounding the deadly Capitol insurrection last year as then-President Trump and his allies tried to subvert the election.
The panel’s first hearing will take place on Thursday at 8 p.m. ET. The committee has not announced who will testify, but Raskin outlined some of the takeaways the public can expect in an interview on Washington Post Live on Monday:
Jan. 6 was a ‘concerted multistep effort’
Raskin dismissed the notion that the Capitol insurrection was simply a “rowdy demonstration” gone awry. While signaling that the committee will provide a comprehensive introduction and overview of its findings throughout the hearings this month, Raskin stressed that Jan. 6 was an “extraordinary and unprecedented event” spurred by a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
“The committee has found evidence of concerted planning and premeditated activity,” Raskin said. “The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little out of control is absurd.”
Raskin said the public can expect the hearings to reveal all of the players behind the incitement of the Jan. 6 attack.
Trump at the center
Asked whether Trump was at the center of the conspiracy theories that fueled the insurrection, Raskin replied that the public will have to make judgments themselves about the role different people played, but:
“Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events,” Raskin said. “That’s the only way really of making sense of them all.”
Raskin pointed to the majority of the House and Senate voting to impeach Trump for “incitement of insurrection” (noting that the Senate’s 55-45 vote did not meet the Constitution’s requirement of a two-thirds vote to convict), before saying the committee has found evidence “about a lot more than incitement here.”
“We’re going to be laying out all of the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan. 6,” Raskin said.
Hearings aimed at helping public connect the dots
Raskin agreed with fellow committee member Adam Schiff’s (D-CA) indication yesterday that the hearings will unveil new information, but emphasized that the hearings will serve as a vehicle to help the public “connect the dots” on the events surrounding Jan, 6.
“We are communicating what we have found in what I think is nearly a yearlong investigation. We just have an absolute mountain of evidence about what took place and our problem is really distilling the core elements of all of these events to share with the people,” Raskin said. “But I hope all of the most important material evidence will be made available to the public.”
