WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 panel is convening a surprise hearing this week to present evidence it says it obtained recently, raising expectations of new bombshells in the sweeping investigation into the Capitol Rebellion.
The hearing, scheduled for 1 p.m. Tuesday, comes after Congress leaves Washington on a two-week recess. Lawmakers on the panel investigating the January 6, 2021 uprising said last week there would be no more hearings until July.
The subject of the hearings is as yet unclear. A spokesperson for the panel declined to comment on its contents.
The committee’s investigation is ongoing during the hearings that began three weeks ago, and the nine-member panel has continued to investigate the attack by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. Among other investigative evidence, the commission recently obtained new images of Trump and his inner circle taken both before and after January 6, 2021, from British filmmaker Alex Holder.
Holder said last week that he had complied with a congressional subpoena to hand over all of 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 during the campaign pad. The images contain material from before and after the uprising.
It is uncertain whether the footage of Holder will be the subject of Tuesday’s hearing or whether Holder will be there himself. Russell Smith, a lawyer for Holder, declined to comment.
Representative Bennie Thompson, the panel’s Democratic chair, told reporters last week that the committee had obtained the footage and needed more time to review the hours of the video Holder had flipped. The British filmmaker came in on Thursday for a two-hour statement, Smith said last week.
Smith then said it was Holder’s “civic duty” to come forward and that the footage during the hearings showed some inconsistencies with previous testimony.
The panel has held five hearings so far, most detailing Trump’s campaign of pressure on various institutions of power in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress that ultimately endorsed Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory. The committee has released pressure from Trump and his allies on Vice President Mike Pence, on the states that confirmed Biden’s victory and at the Ministry of Justice.
The panel used live interviews, video testimony from its personal witness interviews, and also footage from the attack to detail what it learned.
Lawmakers last week said the two July hearings would focus on domestic extremists who broke into the Capitol that day and what Trump was doing as the violence unfolded.