Jan. 6 panel’s next hearings to focus on misinformation

WASHINGTON — The House panel investigating the attack on the Capitol is prepared next week to reveal more details and testimony about its assessment that former President Trump was made well aware of his election loss.

With testimony from some 1,000 interviews and 140,000 documents over the yearlong probe, it will lay out how Trump was told repeatedly that there were no hidden ballots, rigged voting machines or support for his other outlandish claims. Nevertheless, Trump refused to accept defeat and his desperate attempt to cling to the presidency resulted in the most violent domestic attack on the Capitol in history.

“Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated sevenpart plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., told the hearing Thursday night. “Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States,” she said.

When the panel resumes Monday, it will delve into its findings that Trump and his advisers knew early on that he had in fact lost the election but engaged in a “massive effort” to spread false information to convince the public otherwise.

On Wednesday, the panel will hear testimony from the highest levels of the Trump-era Department of Justice — Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his top deputy Richard Donoghue and Steven Engel, the former head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel — according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss their appearances.

The testimony from the three former Justice Department officials is expected to center on a chaotic stretch in the final weeks of the administration when Trump openly weighed the idea of replacing Rosen with a lower-ranking official, Jeffrey Clark, who was seen as more willing to champion in court the president’s false claims of voter fraud.

Thursday will turn to Trump’s remarkable efforts to press Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on Jan. 6, a scheme proposed at the White House by an outside lawyer, John Eastman.

During the insurrection, rioters prowled the halls of the Capitol shouting “hang Mike Pence” when the vice president refused Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election.

The hearings may not change Americans’ views on the Capitol attack, but the panel’s investigation is intended to stand as its public record and could result in referrals for prosecution.

Early Friday, Trump responded on his social media site, decrying the “WITCH HUNT!” even as he fully acknowledged he refused to accept defeat.

“Many people spoke to me about the Election results, both pro and con, but I never wavered one bit,” he said, pushing his false claim of a stolen election.

Trump declared that Jan. 6 “represented the greatest movement in the history of our country.”

Trump also sought to separate himself from his daughter Ivanka Trump’s recorded testimony, in which she said she accepted former Attorney General Bill Barr’s view that there was no election fraud.

“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” Trump wrote. “She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).”

The start of the monthlong hearings opened Thursday in prime-time with the panel laying the blame for the insurrection squarely on Trump, saying the assault was not spontaneous but an “attempted coup” and a direct result of the defeated president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

With a never-beforeseen 12-minute video of extremist groups leading the deadly siege and startling testimony from Trump’s most inner circle, the committee provided new detail of an imperiled democracy.

“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., chairman of the panel, during the hearing, timed for prime time to reach as many Americans as possible. “The violence was no accident.”