The House panel investigating last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol is set to revive the public portion of its probe this month, eyeing at least two more hearings in the coming weeks to highlight former President Trump’s role in the deadly rampage.
Publicly, the inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack has been overshadowed in recent weeks by the FBI’s extraordinary seizure of thousands of government documents, including those alleged to be highly sensitive, from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida last month — part of a separate Justice Department investigation into Trump’s potential mishandling of federal records.
But behind the scenes, the Jan. 6 select committee has spent Congress’s long summer recess plugging away, interviewing a number of new witnesses while seeking the cooperation of several more, including such prominent GOP figures as former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Vice President Mike Pence.
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As the House returns to Washington this week, the panel is promising to air its new findings in at least one public hearing this month, with another perhaps to follow in October — a schedule that would put Trump and his GOP supporters on the defensive heading into November’s midterm elections.
The exact timing of the hearings, as well as the witness list, remain works in progress, according to members of the committee. But a central focus of the investigation throughout August was the wide-ranging effort by a long list of Trump supporters — some of them on Capitol Hill — to install slates of fake electors in certain battleground states where Trump has claimed, falsely, that he prevailed over President Biden. Gingrich, the committee has found, was a part of that effort.
“Former House Speaker Gingrich appears to have been involved in some of the planning around the counterfeit electors scheme, and efforts to substitute a fraudulent process for the actual process,” a member of the select committee said in an interview.
Another member of the committee, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), said Gingrich’s campaign to keep Trump in the White House did not stop even after Congress voted to certify Biden’s victory in the aftermath of the failed insurrection.
“We also have information about his efforts to get the election overturned, even after the riot on the 6th,” Lofgren told CNN earlier this month.
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But time is running short.
With Democrats expected to lose control of the House in the midterms, the panel will have to wrap up its investigation before year’s end, or Republicans will pull the plug on it. With that in mind, the panel is expected to issue an interim report on its findings before November’s elections, with its final report to follow later in the year.
“When the final report is released, the committee is dissolved,” Lofgren said earlier this summer. “And so, so long as information continues to come in, we want to avoid that result. We don’t want to prematurely cut off witnesses who want to be heard.”
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Jan. 6 panel set to reemerge with eye on Newt Gingrich https://t.co/nE12cWwFhR pic.twitter.com/JTx96cfyRT
— The Hill (@thehill) September 12, 2022
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