President Joe Biden has weighed in on tonight’s January 6 public hearing giving a starkly different statement to his predecessor, Donald Trump.
During a meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at the ninth annual Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, Mr Biden said the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021 was “a flagrant violation of the Constitution”.
As the meeting opened, the president said: “One of the things that will be occupying my country tonight, I suspect, is the first open hearings on January 6 and as I said when it was occurring and subsequent, I think it was a clear, flagrant violation of the Constitution.”
“I think these guys and women broke the law and tried to turn around the result of the election,” he added. “There’s a lot of questions about who is responsible and who is involved. I’m not going to make a judgment on that."
Further, he noted a lot of Americans would be seeing some of the detail of the events of the day for the first time.
Earlier, former President Trump called the violent attack on Congress by his supporters “not simply a protest” but actually “the greatest movement” in US history.
Mr Trump made the incendiary statement praising the rioters who sacked the Capitol in hopes of keeping him in the White House for a second term on Thursday.
It appeared on his own Truth Social platform, which he started posting on earlier this year because he is banned from Twitter and most mainstream social media sites.
The twice-impeached ex-president also complained that the House select committee “didn’t spend one minute studying the reason that people went to Washington, DC, in massive numbers”.
However, a group of committee investigators has been looking into the relationship between the lies Mr Trump began telling about the conduct of the 2020 election and the riot that happened on 6 January 2021.
The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection on 6 January 2021 will hold six public hearings, according to a draft schedule.
Multiple broadcasters will carry the proceedings live and hearings will also be shown on the committee’s website.
The hearings begin at 8pm this evening.
