WASHINGTON (CN) — A Capitol Police officer recalled slipping in blood in what she described as a "war zone."
Donald Trump's handpicked former campaign manager, attorney general, and legal counsel all stated in never-before-seen footage how they told the then-president that his election fraud claims were a lie.
Addressing an audience that has had a year and a half to let some details of the insurrection slip to the back of its consciousness, the House select committee has leaned into the drama of the day in the first three of what will be seven hearings throughout the month of June that reveal the details of its investigation.
"They've done everything in really explicitly theatrical terms," Josh Chafetz, law professor at Georgetown Law School, said in an interview. "They've done a really good job with casting, in the sense that they focused a lot on using Republicans as witnesses — both in person and in video tapes of the previous testimony — so as to deflect any criticism that this is a partisan event. Likewise, they've let, in many ways, Liz Cheney be sort of the face of the committee."
After a nearly yearlong investigation and more than 1,000 witness interviews digging into the time before and during what was supposed to be a perfunctory hearing to certify Joe Biden's election win, the panel is waging a targeted campaign to rally public opinion and raise alarm about how the peaceful transition of American democratic power was nearly shattered.
The panel has argued that the events of Jan. 6 were not isolated occurrences, that Trump supporters did not coincidentally show up and breach the Capitol complex on the same day Congress was set to certify the Electoral College results in Biden's favor. Rather, they were egged on by Trump's dissemination of baseless claims that the election was stolen and that then-Vice President Mike Pence had the legal authority to stop the certification.
“Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them: that the election was stolen, and that he was the rightful president,” Representative Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans on the committee, said during the first hearing. "President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack."
Cheney minced no words in her speech that first day and made clear the committee's argument: The Jan. 6 insurrection happened because of corrupt pressure by then-President Trump.
“It struck me as if it was the opening statement to a jury in a criminal trial, as if they're laying out the case. And I don't think at the end of the day, the committee wants to end by saying, ‘Just put it in the record books, just put it in the history books.’ I think they're building a criminal prosecution case," election law expert David Schultz, a political science professor at Hamline University, said in an interview.
Through direct witness testimony and excerpts of depositions with former Trump and Pence aides, the committee has focused in particular on how Trump and conservative attorney John Eastman forged ahead with Eastman's legal theory that Pence had the power to subvert the Electoral College despite repeated pronouncements from various sources, including those in their own corner, that the election was legitimate and Eastman's theory was illegal.
Trump's former Attorney General William Barr, who resigned before Jan. 6, and former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, whose department conducted "dozens of investigations" into election integrity, said in recorded testimony that the election results were legitimate.
"They’ve done a good job so far, trying to make the argument that this wasn't just some sort of delusion that everyone around Trump was indulging him in, but rather that he was being told repeatedly that this was not right, and insisted on it anyway," Chafetz said.
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