The Insurrection: Coming Soon to a Station Near You

House Jan. 6 congressional committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Chair Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)

The January 6 Committee in the House of Representatives has been meeting regularly since it was established almost a year ago.  After hearing more than a thousand hours of testimony and perusing hundreds of thousands of document pages, the committee is preparing to tell the American people what they have learned.  There have been a few coordinated leaks about the Committee’s investigation, but this will be the first time most of us have learned about their findings. Their first hearing is Thursday evening, June 9, at 8:00 pm.  Meanwhile, the Committee is continuing every day to call more witnesses to testify.  Thursday’s hearing is the first of several hearings that, in the words of Republican committee member Adam Kinzinger, will “blow the roof off the House.”

Here’s some information about the hearings, summarized from a couple of news sources:

Schedule of hearings

After Thursday’s event, the next televised event will be Monday, June 13, at 10 am.  The other hearings haven’t been officially scheduled yet, but there could be as many as eight in total through June.  A final hearing will be in September, right before the midterm elections.  The committee is expected to release its final report at that point.  The committee is feeling some urgency – if the Republicans take control of the House of Representatives after this election, they have vowed to abolish the committee and to bring impeachment proceedings against a variety of Democrats, including President Joe Biden.  Impeachment for what?  Well, that’s not clear.

How to watch the hearings

Thursday’s hearing will be aired in full by ABC, NBC, CBS, MSNBC, and CNN.  Of the major networks, only Fox “News” is refusing to air the hearings, promising rather that it will talk about the hearings if anything that happens warrants news coverage. Fox is planning “counter-programming” instead, featuring House Republicans and other Trump allies to talk about how the hearings are invalid. Unfortunately, this means that the Fox “News” viewers who are arguably least informed about the reality of the insurrection will be able to avoid actually learning anything.

What to watch for

• The committee is expected to lay out their findings relating to a months-long Republican conspiracy, led by Donald Trump,  to deny Joe Biden his legitimate election victory.  Many people that the investigators wanted to hear from – close Trump allies or Republican members of Congress – either refused to testify or chose not to answer questions on 5th amendment grounds when they appeared before the Committee.  The investigators then called in staffers to some of the top players, as well as members of the Trump family.  During the hearing, they plan to play videos of some of their interviews, featuring their interviews with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.

• Each hearing will have a specific purpose or theme.  The purpose of the first hearing is to provide an overview of the Committee’s activities over the past 11 months.  This hearing is expected to feature a documentary filmmaker who interviewed the Proud Boys before and during the January 6 events, as well as a Capitol police officer injured in the attack.  Other witnesses at this hearing have not been announced yet, although we may hear more about them during the day today. The interview with the Proud Boys is of particular interest, as leaders of that organization were charged with seditious conspiracy this week. Members of another group associated with planning this insurrection, the Oath-Keepers, were charged with this crime a few months ago. They are all awaiting trial. This crime carries the possibility of a prison sentence of up to 20 years.

• Subsequent hearings are expected to focus on some of the following issues:

  • Trump’s activities on June 6

  • How Trump and his allies tried to keep him in power by dismantling or disabling the legitimate electoral processes between election day and January 6

  • How the spread of disinformation (let’s just call them lies) led to the insurrection and its aftermath

  • Policy recommendations to prevent such an attack from happening again. (This is the one thing the House can do on its own; this “legislative purpose” is the basis of the Committee’s legitimacy, and it underpins everything else the Committee is doing. Republicans who argue that this Committee is illegitimate are incorrect; in early May of this year, a Trump-appointed judge, U.S. District Court Judge Tim Kelly in the District of Columbia, ruled that the Committee is a legitimate investigative part of Congress. Republicans who continue to challenge the Committee’s legitimacy hope you don’t know that.)

• The Committee is also grappling with the question of how to make the public care about the details of an attack that took place almost 1½ years ago.  Other things are occupying the public’s mind;  inflation, gun violence, and the war in Ukraine are taking up a lot of the oxygen in the room.  Nonetheless, repeated polling shows that most American believe that Trump was at least partially responsible for the events of January 6, 2021. 

  • In polls taken both immediately after the attack and most recently in May of 2022, a majority of the respondents believed that Trump should be charged with a crime related to these events.  There is a huge partisan disparity in the poll results; while 88% of Democrats think he should be charged (count me in that category), only 11% of Republicans agree.  56% of independents think he should be charged. This is clearly a result of the information silos that filter the news we consume.

• The Committee has acknowledged that it will be difficult to capture the attention of the American public.  To help them do this more effectively, they have brought in former ABC News president James Goldston (Producer of Good Morning America and Nightline) to advise the Committee on the production of the hearings.  The Committee is relying on his news-gathering and storytelling skills to create a dramatic presentation of the attack on the Capitol. The only previous event of this magnitude was the series of Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973, when there were only three networks (all of them covered the hearings gavel-to-gavel) and we all watched Walter Cronkite at 6:30 to find out what had happened during the day. Today there are too many streaming and other entertainment options to count on a captive audience. These hearings have to put on a show to capture the attention of America.

• The Committee believes that one way to point out the seriousness of the January 6 events is to pound home the fact that the forces underlying the insurrection are continuing to try to undermine our elections system, as deniers of election legitimacy are working to gain control of the machinery of voting in the various states.  This would allow them to make other bids to control the election results in the 2022 midterm elections and in the 2024 presidential election.  In an interview with CBS that aired this weekend, Liz Cheney, the top Republican on the committee and its Vice-Chair, tried to move the conversation forward, saying that Trump has expressed no remorse for what happened — and that that’s worrisome for the next election.

  • “We are, in fact, in a situation where he continues to use even more extreme language, frankly, than the language that caused the attack,” she added. “And so, people must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don’t defend it.”

This is “Must See TV.”