The next Jan 6 hearing will not take place Thursday, as sources familiar with the committee’s plan already told CNN. A committee aide said later on Monday, “we expect that we will hold a hearing next week”.
The next session would then take place in the week of July 18 though no date has been set yet. The eighth hearing will be on July 21 during prime time.
As per the aide, the delay in schedule is meant to give the committee members as well as investigators the time to process “new and important information” it’s received on a “daily basis”.
The upcoming hearing is expected to focus on the 187 minutes of Capitol Hill being under siege and will lay out in detail what then-president Donald Trump was or was not doing at the time.
Members of the committee have called it a “dereliction of duty”. One of the questions that lingered is why it took this long for the National Guard to respond. The local and Capitol Police were overwhelmed, and vice-chair Rep Liz Cheney, said earlier that then vice-president Mike Pence had to call reinforcements because Trump wouldn’t.
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This session could be among the last of the hearings. It was earlier believed that Trump’s actions during the assault would be saved for last but the committee now continues to gather witnesses and collect testimony.
Ahead of the hearing, Cheney said, “You will hear that Donald Trump never picked up the phone that day to order his administration to help. This is not ambiguous. He did not call the military. His secretary of defense received no order. He did not call his attorney general. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security”.
Cheney already announced at the end of the hearing, Tuesday, that the Department of Justice has been intimated of Trump’s attempt to contact a witness who’s not yet been publicly disclosed.
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In today’s hearing, the committee heard what happened inside the White House meeting on December 18, 2020, after which Trump put out the galvanizing tweet on December 19. An ex-Twitter employee also detailed how the former president used the platform to “communicate directly” with extremist groups, while an unpublished tweet indicates that the call for the insurrection was “deliberate” on part of the Republican.