A US House committee hearing on Thursday will offer the most compelling evidence yet of then US President Donald Trump’s “dereliction of duty” on the day of the January 6 riot, with new witnesses detailing his failure to stop the raid of an angry mob at the US Capitol, committee members said Sunday. “This is going to open people’s eyes in a big way,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a member of the House committee investigating the insurgency, who will help lead Thursday’s meeting with Rep. Elaine Luria. D-Va. “The president did nothing.” After a year-long investigation, the House panel on Jan. 6 seeks to wrap up its final hearing, even as the investigation continues to heat up. The committee says it continues to receive new evidence every day and has not ruled out additional hearings or interviews with a group of additional people close to the president. One such person is Steve Bannon, whose trial begins this week on criminal contempt of Congress charges for refusing to comply with a House committee subpoena. The committee also issued an emergency subpoena last week to the Secret Service to produce texts by Tuesday from Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, after conflicting reports about whether they were deleted. But committee members say Thursday’s hearing will be the most concrete yet to compile and piece together previously known details about how Trump’s actions ran afoul of his constitutionally legal duty to stop the 6 January. Unlike members of the public who generally have no duty to take action to prevent a crime, the Constitution requires the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” “The commander-in-chief is the only person in the Constitution whose duty is expressly set forth to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed,” Luria said. “I see it as a dereliction of duty. (Trump) didn’t act. He had a duty to act.” Thursday’s hearing will be the first in the prime-time slot since its June 9 debut, which was watched by an estimated 20 million people. Luria said the hearing will highlight additional testimony from White House counsel Pat Cipollone and other witnesses, not seen before, “that will add a lot of value and information to the events of that critical time on January 6.” He cited Trump’s inaction. day for more than three hours, along with a tweet that afternoon criticizing Vice President Mike Pence for lacking the courage to challenge Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, which may have fueled the mob. “We’re going to go almost minute-by-minute during that time frame, from the time he left the stage at the Ellipse, came back to the White House, and actually sat in the White House, in the dining room, with his advisers urging him to take over action, to take more action,” Luria said. The hearing comes at a critical point for the commission, which is scrambling to finalize findings for a final report this fall. The committee initially expected at this point to wrap up much of its investigation with a final hearing, but is now considering possible options for additional interviews and hearings, committee members said. “This investigation is very ongoing,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif. “The fact that a series of hearings is set to conclude this Thursday does not mean that our investigation is over. It’s very active, new witnesses are coming in, additional information is coming in.” For example, the committee took the rare step last week of subpoenaing the Secret Service, an executive branch. That came after he received a classified tip from the Department of Homeland Security’s surveillance agency that the Secret Service had deleted texts around Jan. 6, according to two people familiar with the matter. The finding raised the startling prospect of missing evidence that could shed further light on Trump’s actions during the uprising, particularly after earlier testimony about his confrontation with security as he tried to join supporters on Capitol Hill. “That’s what we need to get to the bottom of,” Luria said, regarding possibly missing texts. “Where are those text messages? Can they be recovered? And we have subpoenaed them because they are legal records that we need to see for the committee.” Luria spoke on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Lofgren was on ABC’s “This Week” and Kinzinger appeared on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
Associated Press writer Will Weissert contributed to this report.
