Capitol riot panel to focus on ties between far-right groups and Donald Trump

Former US President Donald Trump (File image: Reuters)

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack plans to focus its hearing on Tuesday on the violent domestic extremist groups that stormed the Capitol, and the role of former President Donald Trump in assembling the mob that disrupted the electoral count.

The session, set for 1 p.m., to be led by Reps. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., is expected to document how, after Trump’s many efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed, he and his allies began galvanizing a dangerous collection of supporters, including far-right militias, to descend on Washington as Congress met to confirm his defeat.

The panel expects to hear live testimony from Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers; and Stephen Ayres, an Ohio man who joined the mob and recently pleaded guilty to illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The hearing will document the increasingly chaotic and desperate atmosphere inside the Trump White House after his loss as the president’s various attempts to stay in office fell flat. In particular, the panel plans to detail the involvement of members of Congress in the buildup to Jan. 6, including assisting Trump’s pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to persuade him to overturn the election unilaterally.

The committee will focus on an extraordinary Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, in which Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, Sidney Powell, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist, and Patrick Byrne, a wealthy business executive who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election, pitched Trump on extreme plans to keep him in power, such as seizing voting machines.

A little over an hour after that meeting ended, Trump posted a message to Twitter that began assembling a crowd to come to Washington for a rally on Jan. 6 that, the president wrote, would “be wild.”

The post sparked a chain of events, and prompted the right-wing chauvinist group the Proud Boys to begin planning for violence on Jan. 6. Along with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the Q-Anon movement, which is based on a set of baseless conspiracy theories, will be a focus on the hearing.

The panel also plans to focus on how White House staff and close advisers to Trump received warnings that there could be violence on Jan. 6.

Raskin, who has developed an expertise on domestic violent extremist groups, has hinted at disclosing evidence of more direct ties between Trump and far-right organizations, though he has declined to preview any. The panel plans to detail known links between extremist groups and the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Trump’s, and Flynn.

The hearing will be the first since the explosive, surprise testimony last month by Cassidy Hutchinson, a junior-level aide in Trump’s White House who came forward to provide a damning account of the president’s actions on Jan. 6. She recounted how Trump, knowing his supporters were armed and threatening violence, urged them to march to the Capitol and sought to join them there.

The select committee has held seven public hearings to date, beginning with one last year in which it highlighted the testimonials of four police officers who battled the mob and helped secure the Capitol.

After conducting more than 1,000 interviews, the committee began a series of public hearings last month to lay out the findings of its investigation, including sessions on how Trump spread the lie of a stolen election and his pressure campaign against Pence, state officials and the Justice Department in a barrage of increasingly desperate efforts to overturn the election.

The committee’s next hearing, tentatively scheduled for next week, is expected to focus on Trump’s inaction for 187 minutes on Jan. 6, as violence raged at the Capitol and he resisted repeated entreaties to call off the mob, instead sympathizing with the rioters.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Luke Broadwater

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