Jan. 6 panel adds last-minute hearing Tuesday afternoon

WASHINGTON — The Jan. 6 committee will hold a last-minute public hearing Tuesday to present new evidence and hear witness testimony, after having previously said it would take a break until mid-July.

The hearing is scheduled for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET, according to an advisory the committee sent out Monday. In an unusual move, the committee has not identified the witness, as it did for previous hearings.

“There is new evidence that is coming to [the committee’s] attention on an almost daily basis," said a source familiar with the hearing. The committee was “just planning on working this week in preparation for the final two hearings, so this is unplanned.

"You can deduce from that that there will be a lot of significance to the hearing.”

Monday's announcement came as a surprise given that Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and aides for the Jan. 6 panel said just last week that there would be no other public hearings in June and that the next set of hearings would take place when Congress returns from its two-week July Fourth recess, sometime in mid-July.

Two hearings were originally scheduled for this week, but they were delayed, panel members said, to give the committee more time to prepare and because the panel continues to learn more information.

"The next couple of hearings will cover the run-up to Jan. 6, the marshaling of this mob that appeared on the mall that day, and the attack on the Capitol," Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a panel member, said Sunday during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press."

"The final hearing will cover what the president was doing and more importantly, what he was not doing as we were being attacked," he said. "Basically, the president's flagrant dereliction of duty while the Capitol was being attacked."

The nine-member House select committee has already held five hearings this month on themes including then-President Donald Trump's pressure campaign on his vice president, Mike Pence, on Justice Department officials, and on state and local officials.

During past hearings, the panel has featured live and recorded testimony from then-Attorney General Bill Barr and other top Trump White House, administration and campaign officials who described how Trump and a handful of his allies aggressively pursued a plot to block certification of Joe Biden’s victory in several key swing states and overturn the 2020 election.

At last Thursday’s hearing, a trio of former top Justice officials recounted a dramatic Oval Office meeting with Trump where they threatened to resign if he appointed Jeffrey Clark, who was willing to investigate Trump’s false claims of widespread election fraud, to lead DOJ.

“I said, ‘Mr. President, you’re talking about putting a man in that seat who has never tried a criminal case, who’s never conducted a criminal investigation. He’s telling you that he’s going to take charge of the department — 115,000 employees, including the entire FBI — and turn the place on a dime and conduct nationwide criminal investigations that will produce results in a matter of days,” Richard Donoghue, Trump’s former acting deputy attorney general, testified.

“‘It’s impossible. It’s absurd. It’s not going to happen and it’s going to fail.’”