Jan. 6 panel to focus next on 187 minutes between Trump leaving stage and statement to nation: member

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said in an interview that the panel plans to focus on the 187 minutes between former President Trump leaving a rally stage to his statement to the country while the insurrection was in progress.

During an appearance on ABC News’s “GMA3,” Luria, a Navy veteran, said that she and fellow committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) plan to detail how Trump reacted in the more than three-hour span on Jan 6. 

“Mr. Kinzinger and I plan to go through that 187 minutes. What happened between the time that he [Trump] left the stage and gave these inflammatory remarks and gave people the impression … that he was going to himself march with this crowd to the Capitol?” Luria said. 

“What happened between that moment and then around 4:17 in the afternoon, which is 187 minutes later, when he finally made a statement to the nation, to the people at the Capitol to go home?” she added. 

Luria also said that the former president “wasn’t emphatic” in his video message where he called for rioters to leave the Capitol, saying that the committee plans to talk about Trump’s “dereliction of duty.” 

The House Jan. 6 committee conducted its seventh public hearing on Tuesday, with new testimony from individuals who took part in the insurrection that resulted in the deaths of five people. 

Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the far-right militia group Oath Keepers who testified before the committee, said in an interview that the country came “very, very close” to an actual civil war when the Capitol attack occurred.  

“I don’t know how far they’ve gotten into the endgame, but what we saw on Jan. 6 is certainly very much how it would look to start out,” Van Tatenhove told CNN’s “New Day.” “We came very, very close to having a civil war kick off on Jan. 6.”

Both Luria and Kinzinger are expected to co-lead the next scheduled congressional public hearing on the attack on July 21, ABC News noted.