The last House January 6 committee hearing before the midterm elections will reveal as-yet-unseen evidence about former president Donald Trump’s state of mind before the Capitol riot.
A select committee aide said the Thursday hearing — the first since this summer — would “revisit a lot of the themes that we discussed in June and July, but with new information to shine additional light on our findings ... to help tell the story that we've told more completely”.
“What you're going to see is a synthesis of some evidence we've already presented with new, never before seen information to illustrate Donald Trump's centrality in the scheme from the time prior to the election,” the aide said.
Committee aides also said the hearing would last for roughly two and a half hours and would involve presentations from each member of the nine-member panel showing “ongoing threats to our democracy that persist to this day”.
Although the hearing will include witness testimony, it will not feature any live witnesses and will instead use video depositions taken over the course of the panel’s investigation.
The panel is also expected to present evidence it has recieved from the Secret Service in the period since a former Trump White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, delivered shocking testimony alleging that Mr Trump assaulted a member of his protective detail and tried grabbing the wheel of his armoured SUV when he was told he could not accompany the riotous mob he had summoned to Washington on a march to the Capitol.
Former Secret Service agent Tony Ornato and the then-head of Mr Trump’s protective detail, Robert Engel, had both been offered as witnesses by the agency, though Mr Ornato retired from government service in the wake of Ms Hutchinson’s appearance before the select committee.
Neither has testified before the panel at this time, but committee aides said the investigation has resulted in “a huge amount of information” being turned over by the agency, including emails and hundreds of thousands of documents.
“We will present some of that information tomorrow and then looking forward — in terms of the final report and elsewhere — I think you'll see more of that included there,” the aide said, though they demurred when asked whether any evidence had been discovered to confirm or debunk Ms Hutchinson’s sworn statements.
