What To Expect From The Second Public Jan. 6 Committee Hearing

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol will hold a second public hearing at 10 a.m. ET Monday as it continues to present its findings related to former President Donald Trump’s role in the violence that day.

The first hearing aired for two hours on prime-time television on Thursday and drew 20 million viewers. All broadcast and cable news networks except Fox News carried the hearing live.

The committee has six public hearings planned in total, and at least one more will be during prime time.

During the first hearing, the committee released never-before-seen video of the violence and showed testimony from former Attorney General William Barr and Ivanka Trump, Trump’s daughter and former White House adviser.

Trump responded to the first hearing with a barrage of messages on his Truth Social app, his main method of communicating with supporters since he was banned from Twitter for spreading election falsehoods.

You can catch up here on the big moments you might have missed from the first hearing. Here’s what to expect from the next round:

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, said last week that the second hearing will show that Trump and his advisers knew he lost the election to President Joe Biden, but that, despite this, Trump “engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him.”

Barr’s testimony aired Thursday already touched on this point. Barr said he told Trump his claims around election fraud were “bullshit” and that he did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen.

We can expect more testimony and findings from people in Trump’s orbit saying they told him he had lost the election and there was no evidence to support Trump’s allegations.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said Sunday that the committee could “prove to any reasonable, open-minded person that Donald Trump absolutely knew” he lost.

“Any reasonable person in America will tell you, he had to have known he was spreading a big lie, and he continues to spread it to this very day,” Raskin told CNN.

Ben Ginsberg, a Republican attorney who is considered an expert on elections, will testify there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, according to CNN. He will also testify on the many failed legal challenges by Trump’s team.

CNN cited sources on Ginsberg’s testimony, as the committee investigating Jan. 6 hasn’t publicly released the names of those testifying.

Ginsberg played a crucial role in the 2000 presidential recount and defeat of Al Gore to George W. Bush.

He also criticized Trump in a November 2020 opinion piece in The Washington Post, saying Trump had launched an “all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters.”

Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor, is set to testify Monday.

While Stirewalt said he couldn’t discuss exactly what his testimony will be, it should be related to the committee’s theme of what Trump and his team knew versus how they acted.

Stirewalt was fired from the network in January 2021 after receiving right-wing backlash to his decision to call Arizona for Biden on election night 2020, which reportedly infuriated Trump.

Stirewalt defended his decision in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times in January 2021 and criticized American media. “Having been cosseted by self-validating coverage for so long, many Americans now consider any news that might suggest that they are in error or that their side has been defeated as an attack on them personally,” he wrote.

Committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) on Sunday touched on the amount of misinformation that flooded the zone around the time of the Jan. 6 attack and continues to be pervasive.

Kinzinger said Thursday’s hearing was meant to be a top-line look at what happened. He also responded to Trump’s claim that the president tried to reach out to the National Guard during the violence after testimony showed then-Vice President Mike Pence had to jump in when the president wouldn’t.

“I think it’s very obvious that the president didn’t do anything but gleefully watch television when this was going down,” Kinzinger told CBS’s “Face the Nation.”