TONIGHT: Are You Ready For Some Primetime Crimetime?
For politics junkies, this could be the event of a lifetime.
Popcorn? Check. Beverage? Check. Comfortable seat? Check.
It's almost showtime. Tonight, the House Jan. 6th committee holds the first in a series of hearings, a highly anticipated look at the evidence they've been gathering for the last year. Via the Associated Press:
With the televised hearings, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the nine-member panel hope to grab the attention of the American public and drive home the sheer violence of that day in 2021, as some have attempted to downplay the attack. And they plan to use the more than 1,000 interviews they have conducted to spotlight people who played pivotal roles in the siege — and to show that it was a deliberate, unprecedented attempt to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
The committee will sort through the mountain of information it has collected into different hearing topics, from domestic extremism to security failures to what former President Donald Trump was doing in the White House that day as hundreds of his supporters brutally pushed past police and forced their way into the Capitol.
Thursday’s prime-time hearing will be both an overview of the investigation and a preview of the hearings to come. It will also look at domestic extremism, with testimony from British filmmaker Nick Quested, who recorded members of the far-right Proud Boys as they stormed the building, and Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer who was one of the first people injured in the riot as the Proud Boys and others pushed past police.