Jan. 6 committee delays hearing schedule until July

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is pressing pause on its hearings for next week and picking them up again in July. 

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the committee, told reporters Wednesday that the committee would hold off on the two final hearings it had planned for this month. 

“We’ve taken in some additional information that’s going to require additional work. So rather than present hearings that have not been the quality of the hearings in the past we made a decision to just move into sometime in July,” Thompson said.

Thursday’s hearing will continue as planned.

“There’s been a deluge of new evidence since we got started. And we just need to catch our breath, go through the new evidence, and then incorporate it into the hearings we have planned,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) told reporters. 

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) similarly mentioned a “mountain of new information.”

“I don’t think we’ve established a date yet, but we have a mountain of new information that’s come in that we have to go through,” Lofgren told The Hill. 

The committee has recently received more information from the National Archives, and Raskin said it has also received information from other various sources — a comment that comes after the committee flashed its web address in the hopes of enticing new witnesses. 

The new evidence includes recently turned over video footage from a British documentarian of the attack as well as interviews with former President Trump, his adult children and former Vice President Mike Pence — a figure the committee has been unable to convince to speak to investigators. 

“We have gotten some additional information from a documentarian that we’ll have to review and some additional NARA production that’s going to require a little more time than we anticipated,” Thompson said, using the formal abbreviation for the National Archives.

The shift will leave Thursday’s hearing as the final event for the month of June. That session will focus on Trump’s pressure campaign at the Department of Justice. 

The committee had initially planned to still have two more hearings in June, but Thompson renewed earlier statements that additional hearings beyond the original seven could be announced.

“There may well be a need for further hearings based upon information that they are now receiving. We will see,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters in the Capitol. “I’m not saying there are going to be. But there may well be a decision by the committee to have further hearings on the information that has been elicited because of the hearings.”

Mychael Schnell contributed to this report, which was updated at 3:12 p.m.