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Jan. 6 Panel to Hold Surprise Hearing 06/28 06:23
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The House panel investigating the U.S. Capitol
insurrection is holding a surprise hearing on Tuesday with an unidentified
witness, cloaking the last-minute proceedings in extraordinary secrecy and
raising expectations for new bombshells in the sweeping investigation into the
Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
The unexpected hearing, scheduled for 1 p.m. Tuesday, was announced with 24
hours' notice while lawmakers are away from Washington on a two-week recess.
The committee had said last week that there would be no more hearings until
July.
The subject of the hearing is so far unclear, but the panel's announcement
on Monday said it would be "to present recently obtained evidence and receive
witness testimony." A spokesman for the panel declined to elaborate.
The committee's investigation has been ongoing during the hearings, which
started three weeks ago, and the nine-member panel has continued to probe the
attack by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Among other investigative
evidence, the committee recently obtained new footage of Trump and his inner
circle taken both before and after Jan. 6 from British filmmaker Alex Holder.
Holder said last week that he had complied with a congressional subpoena to
turn over all the footage he shot in the final weeks of Trump's 2020 reelection
campaign, including exclusive interviews with Trump, his children and then-Vice
President Mike Pence. The footage includes material from before the
insurrection and afterward.
It is uncertain if Holder's footage will be shown at the hearing Tuesday.
Russell Smith, a lawyer for Holder, declined to comment.
Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel's Democratic chairman, told
reporters last week that the committee was in possession of the footage and
needed more time to go through the hours of video.
The panel has held five hearings so far, mostly laying out Trump's pressure
campaign on various institutions of power in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6
joint session of Congress, when hundreds of the Republican's supporters
violently pushed past police, broke into the building and interrupted the
certification of Democrat Joe Biden's presidential election victory.
The committee has used the hearings to detail the pressure from Trump and
his allies on Pence, on the states that were certifying Biden's win, and on the
Justice Department. The panel has used live interviews, video testimony of its
private witness interviews and footage of the attack to detail what it has
learned.
Lawmakers said last week that the two July hearings would focus on domestic
extremists who breached the Capitol that day and on what Trump was doing as the
violence unfolded.
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