Jan. 6 hearing alleges Trump election conspiracy, here’s what’s next

In its first public hearing, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot delivered an unambiguous message: There was a calculated effort to overturn the 2020 election results, and former President Donald Trump is to blame.

“Donald Trump was at the center of that conspiracy,” the committee’s chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said bluntly in his opening statement. “Ultimately, Donald Trump — the president of the United States— spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.”

The tightly scripted two-hour hearing, which aired live in primetime Thursday night, was interspersed with new video and audio clips from investigators’ interviews with witnesses, such as former Attorney General William Barr, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump.

Two other witnesses, a U.S. Capitol Police officer and a documentary filmmaker, spoke in person to recount the “carnage” they saw firsthand during the riot. And the committee played a harrowing montage of never-been-seen footage from the riot itself, showing new perspectives on the pro-Trump mob as it rushed toward the Capitol, swarmed police officers and attacked them with weapons.

The nine-member panel also made clear that it has much more to share from the more than 1,000 witness interviews and 140,000 documents amassed over the course of the investigation so far. It emphasized that the investigations is still on going and that the Justice Department has even more evidence, including encrypted materials, it hasn’t yet reviewed.

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the committee’s vice chair and one of its two Republican members, laid out a framework for how the next six hearings will unfold. Her opening statement Thursday night suggested that each hearing will focus on a separate piece of what she called “a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”

Trump himself oversaw and coordinated that multi-pronged plan, Cheney said.

“As you will see in the hearings to come, President Trump believed his supporters at the Capitol, and I quote, ‘were doing what they should be doing,'” Cheney said. “This is what he told his staff as they pleaded with him to call off the mob, to instruct his supporters to leave.”

Trump on Thursday night and Friday morning railed against the committee in a series of posts on conservative social media platform Truth Social, accusing the lawmakers of not showing “the many positive witnesses and statements” and playing “only negative footage.”

The first hearing served to set the table for the subsequent presentations, which are expected to take place over the coming weeks. At least…