The Jan 6 panel after 8 hearings: Where will the evidence lead?

Comprehensive, compellingly scripted and packed with details, the eight hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have laid out a powerful account of President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The select committee assembled a mass of evidence and testimony — provided in large part Trump’s aides and other Republicans — not only for the judgment of hory but also for the purpose of two more immediate and related goals that the panel’s leaders highlighted during the hearing Thursday night.

One, as Rep Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, the panel’s vice chair, said explicitly, is to convince voters that Trump, who has made clear he is likely to run for president in 2024, should be disqualified from holding the office again.
“Every American must consider this,” Cheney said. “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”
The other goal, as the committee has been signalling for months, is to pressure the Justice Department to pursue a more urgent and aggressive investigation into whether Trump could be prosecuted for his actions.
“There needs to be accountability, accountability under the law, accountability to the American people, accountability at every level,” said Rep Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi, the panel’s chair.

“For 187 minutes on January 6th, this man of unbridled, destructive energy could not be moved… Even though he was the only person in the world who could call off the mob he sent to the Capitol.”-Chair @BennieGThompson pic.twitter.com/0XtT38euuv
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 22, 2022
“If there is no accountability for January 6, for every part of this scheme, I fear that we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy,” he said. “There must be stiff consequences for those responsible.”
The extent to which the committee’s work imposes a political cost on Trump changing views of him among persuadable voters might not be fully clear until the next campaign gets underway. And the committee has yet to decide whether to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, a step that would be entirely symbolic and would not bind federal prosecutors to the case against Trump, as it has been laid out in the hearings.
At a minimum, the committee’s hearings have created a backdrop to the early manoeuvring around the 2024 campaign that presents challenges for Trump among independents and Republicans who might want a new face and a more forward-looking candidate. Indeed, the panel’s use of military leaders, top Trump aides and loyal Republicans to narrate its case has arguably been intended to speak to those potential voters.
The hearings have also generated open and growing pressure on Attorney General Merrick Garland, who responded this week saying that “no person” is above the law.
Attorney General Merrick Garland (AP)
The committee now plans to continue its investigation through the summer and hold more public hearings in September. It has produced a wealth of documentary evidence of the extent of Trump’s efforts to hold onto power and has shown signs of breaking through to the audiences it most wants to reach.
Here is a summary of its work so far.
The events of January 6 began well before that day
The phrase “January 6” has always been something of a misnomer, shorthand that is not quite accurate for the turbulent period from Election Day in November 2020 to the afternoon the Capitol was stormed.
One of the committee’s central goals has been to identify and home in on the ways in which Trump and his allies sought to overturn the election results and to show how these intersecting and overlapping efforts culminated in the violence on Capitol Hill.

Trump could have gone to the Press Briefing Room to issue a statement at any moment during the 187 minutes.
Take a look at how easy it would have been for the President to deliver a statement to the nation and call off the attack: pic.twitter.com/sD36GmPnVg
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 23, 2022
Working in TV-friendly episodes, the panel began presenting evidence that Trump knew he had lost but nonetheless spread the “Big Lie” of election fraud in dozens of lawsuits that ultimately failed in court. The panel also showed how, as these suits were being filed, the Trump campaign and its Republican allies used claims of a rigged election that they knew were false to mislead donors and raise as much as $250 million.
“Not only was there the big lie,” Rep Zoe Lofgren, D-California, said at a hearing last month, “there was the big rip-off.”
The committee went on to explore a series of linked attempts to attack the democratic process at what amounted to its key points of vulnerability. That involved Trump and his allies mounting pressure campaigns against local officials in swing states, top officials in the Justice Department and ultimately Vice President Mike Pence, seeking to persuade them to disregard established norms and keep Trump in the White House.
With his options for remaining in power running thin, the president eventually called his supporters to Washington for a “wild” protest January 6, the committee showed. That event, of course, ended when a mob chased lawmakers from the Capitol and Trump watched from the White House, unwilling to use his powers to call off the rioters and quell the violence.
Trump was kept at the center of it all
While the hearings have featured a wide-ranging cast of characters — grizzled local politicians, injured Capitol Police officers, young White House aides, even a tattooed former militiaman — at every step of the way, the committee has kept the spotlight tightly focused on Trump.

Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy managed to get Trump on the phone and told him to call off his supporters. The President refused. pic.twitter.com/tK4nasL0X5
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 22, 2022
Again and again, the panel has painted him as the schemer in chief and the ultimate intended beneficiary.
In its presentation about the effort to pressure Pence, for instance, the committee made sure to introduce evidence that Trump had gone along with the plan even after he was explicitly told it was illegal.
The committee also directly implicated Trump in the effort to cajole lawmakers into creating false slates of electors that showed he had won in states that went for Joe Biden. The panel showed this demonstrating how Trump called Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, to ask her to discuss the fake elector plan with one of his outside lawyers, John Eastman.
In the days leading up to January 6, the panel showed, Trump took overt steps not only to bring a crowd of his supporters to Washington but also to plan for a march on the Capitol while trying to make it seem spontaneous.
Former US President Donald Trump with then Vice President Mike Pence. (AP/File)
He continued to push aggressively to go to the Capitol even after learning that his supporters in the crowd were armed. And as the violence erupted in front of the nation on television, Trump waited hours before doing anything to stop it. He and his lawyer continued to call senators in the hopes of blocking or delaying certification of Biden’s victory.
“Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophicated, seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power,” Cheney said last month, at the committee’s first hearing.
The message got through to the Justice Department
The Justice Department, armed with the most resources and powers in the government, takes the lead in investigating in most high-profile inquiries, often stiff-arming Congress or local prosecutors. But the January 6 hearings have shown how the committee has — at least for now and at least in terms of its public revelations — generally reversed those roles.
One example was the testimony to the committee — first in private and then in public — of a junior White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson. She had not met with Justice Department investigators, nor were prosecutors given any recordings of her testimony or documents beforehand.

Tuesday’s hearing revealed that Trump and his allies knowingly pushed a false scheme to overturn the election, and failed to prevent and stop violence at the Capitol.
4️⃣-minute recap of Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/xa3LPYXlAA
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) July 3, 2022
Hutchinson’s star turn in front of the committee intensified the scrutiny of Garland’s handling of the explosive question of whether and how to pursue a criminal investigation of Trump.
While several lanes of the criminal inquiry that are underway could ultimately uncover evidence against the former president, it was only recently revealed that top officials in the Justice Department were thinking specifically about Trump’s exposure to criminal liability and that more resources had been dedicated to the preexing strands of the inquiry.
In response to questions from reporters Wednesday, Garland provided one of his fullest public statements about the direction of the investigation. While the Justice Department does its investigation out of the public’s view, he said, “every person who is criminally responsible” will be held accountable and “no person is above the law in this country.”
“I can’t say it more clearly than that,” he added.
Garland also said there was nothing that prevented the Justice Department “from investigating anyone who is criminally responsible for an attempt to undo a democratic election.”
The work goes on
The committee’s success in unearthing new information — and in persuading new witnesses to come forward — appears to be encouraging more people to be willing to talk and provide additional information. The panel now says it plans to continue its investigation through the summer and return for another round of hearings in September.
Rep Elaine Luria, D-Virginia, noted Thursday night that the panel expects to hear more sworn testimony about the role that the Secret Service played in the events of January 6. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general is examining the purge of text messages from the phones of Secret Service agents around the time of the attack, and it has characterised its inquiry as a criminal investigation.
The committee is also likely to further explore decisions surrounding the deployment of the National Guard that day.
Rep Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, suggested another avenue of inquiry when he said near the end of the hearing Thursday that the “militant, intolerant ideologies” and “the weird fantasies and disinformation” that Trump set in motion after the election remained a threat to American democracy.
“They’re all still out there, ready to go,” Kinzinger said, suggesting that the committee could examine Trump’s continued efforts after January 6 to influence the election system for his own ends.