So much for a clean summer wrap.
A stream of new evidence and emerging witnesses has led the Jan. 6 committee to extend its public hearings at least another two months, creating new opportunities for investigators to explore former President Trump’s role in the Capitol attack while pushing the disclosure of potentially explosive new findings closer to the midterm elections.
The select committee’s prime-time hearing on Thursday was widely expected to mark the end of a crucial phase in the panel’s probe of last year’s riot, capping six weeks of publicly aired testimony — almost all of it from Republicans — aimed at pinning culpability for the rampage squarely onto Trump’s shoulders.
But every new revelation seems to turn up as many questions as answers, and the panel has altered its schedule to accommodate what it calls a wave of new information in need of perusal. The arrival of new witnesses has been accompanied by successful committee efforts to fight stonewalling in the form of executive privilege claims, and the panel has recently issued new subpoenas for even more evidence.
“The dam has begun to break,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the select committee, said Thursday night. “We have far more evidence to share with the American people — and more to gather.”
With that in mind, the committee said it intends to use Congress’s long August recess to wade through the influx of new information, with designs to hold more hearings on its findings in September when lawmakers return to Washington. How many they’ll stage remains unclear, but the investigators are leaving themselves the flexibility to determine that schedule on the fly.
“We are pursuing many additional witnesses for testimony,” said Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who participated in Thursday’s hearing remotely after testing positive for COVID-19 earlier in the week. “We will reconvene in September to continue laying out our findings.”
Thompson had previously said the committee would hold two additional hearings later in the year, one surrounding the release of an interim report on its findings, and another when it issues its final report. What changed this week was the announcement of new investigative hearings to precede both.
“We’re not done. The information continues to come in. The evidence is continuing to flow in,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) told CNN heading into Thursday’s hearing. “So this is … not the end of the story.”
For the House Democrats who control the chamber, there are potential rewards — and risks — in the select committee’s decision to extend its investigation deeper into the year.
On one hand, the panel has presented compelling evidence that Trump knowingly sent an armed mob to the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying his election defeat. And that damning narrative appears to be hurting Trump’s national standing even within the GOP.
On the other hand, the country is on edge amid a tide of rising inflation, a shooting war in Europe and a global pandemic that’s surging once again this summer. The rash of anxiety-inducing news — particularly on the economic front — has tanked President Biden’s approval rating and damaged the Democrats’ chances of maintaining their majorities in both the House and Senate. In that context, the prolonged focus on Jan. 6 could appear tone-deaf outside the Beltway, where economic uncertainty remains the paramount concern.
Still, members of the investigative panel — and those cheering it on — maintain that Trump’s actions surrounding the 2020 election were so egregious that they have little choice but to conduct a thorough accounting of his effort to overturn the results.
Given the gravity of the task, Lofgren said their timeline “is unrelated to the midterm elections” even if the panel is aware it faces unofficial deadline: The midterms are expected to flip control of the House to Republicans, who would quickly terminate an investigation they consider a political witch hunt designed merely to harm Trump.
There are still eyewitnesses the panel wants to talk to, including Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, who was among the few figures to speak directly with Trump at the White House while the Capitol was under siege.
As it pursues the holdouts, the committee got a boost on Friday when a federal jury found Stephen Bannon, a former Trump adviser, guilty of contempt of Congress for his refusal to comply with the panel’s subpoena to testify.
Investigators are also waiting to learn the outcome of a legal tug of war between the select committee and the Secret Service over a series of agency communications on and around Jan. 6. An internal watchdog at the Homeland Security Department has reported that the Secret Service had “erased” text messages from those days, leading the panel to subpoena the agency for those communications. The messages were not delivered by the July 19 deadline, however, and the DHS investigator has since launched a criminal investigation.
The mystery surrounding those texts — combined with the proximity of certain agents to Trump on Jan. 6 — has only heightened the committee’s interest in learning their content.
“Personally, I feel like we don’t have all the facts, and it’s something that we will continue to pursue, because we need that information,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), another member of the committee, said Thursday in an interview with MSNBC.
Among their remaining tasks, investigators will be releasing an interim report of their findings; staging another public hearing to unveil that document; and deciding when to issue their final report — complete with recommendations for safeguarding future elections — all while fielding new evidence and conducting new witness depositions, virtually on a daily basis.
The two-stage document release reflects the practical reality that the panel continues to receive new information. But the committee’s own longevity is another motivation: Its founding resolution disbands the panel 30 days after it issues its final report, creating plenty of incentive to withhold that report while new details continue to materialize and investigators continue to solicit the cooperation of hold-out witnesses.
“When the final report is released the committee is dissolved,” Lofgren said. “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.”
Somewhere in the mix, the nine-member committee will also have to determine whether to recommend criminal charges to the Justice Department — a highly sensitive decision that could have a substantial influence on the power dynamics between Congress and the White House for many years to come.
Some on the panel are already voicing frustrations that the DOJ hasn’t brought those charges already.
“Obviously, I’m impatient,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a constitutional lawyer and member of the select committee, said Friday in an interview with SiriusXM’s Joe Madison. “We don’t have a lot of time in Congress to do our work, because at the end of this Congress, we’re over.
“I would like to see some motion there.”