Jan. 6 committee holds fourth hearing

Georgia election official Gabe Sterling is testifying now at the House select committee’s fourth hearing this month.

He worked closely with Georiga Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger when he resisted former President Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure him to “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win Georgia in the 2020 election in an infamous January 2021 phone call.

Tuesday’s hearing will focus on how Trump and his allies pressured officials in key battleground states as they sought to overturn the elecion, multiple sources had told CNN.

In December 2020, Sterling publicly pleaded for Trump to condemn the harassment that officials and election workers had been facing.

A month later, rioters stormed the US Capitol.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, left, and his chief operating officer, Gabriel Sterling, arrive Tuesday, June 21, to testify before the the House select committee.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is testifying now in front of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Raffensperger emerged as a national figure in the aftermath of the 2020 election, following the revelation of a Jan. 2, 2021 call with Donald Trump in which the then-President urged Georgia’s chief elections officer to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results after Joe Biden had defeated Trump by nearly 12,000 votes. That call now is part of a special grand jury investigation into whether Trump or his allies committed any crimes in their quest to overturn the election results.

As Trump refused to accept the outcome of the 2020 election and his allies pursued various schemes to try to upend the results, Raffensperger, Raffensperger’s wife, Tricia, and other Georgia officials faced a barrage of threats.

The Georgia Republican had already spoken privately with the Jan. 6 committee about his experience in addition to testifying before the special grand jury in the criminal probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the Peach State.

Raffensperger, who is seeking reelection, defeated Republican Jody Hice in Georgia’s primary election last month. Hice was endorsed by Trump and his campaign centered on false claims about the 2020 election.

Raffensperger has long defended Georgia’s election process. He was also a staunch advocate of the voting law that the Republican-controlled legislature approved in 2021, which imposes a raft of new restrictions on mail-in voting, prohibits providing food and water to people waiting in line to vote and more. Raffensperger has also pushed for a constitutional amendment to ban noncitizen voting, although it’s already illegal under Georgia law.

The secretary of state, who touts himself as a conservative Republican, took office in 2019. He had served two terms in the Georgia General Assembly in 2015-2019.

Read more about the official here.

CNN’s Shawna Mizelle contributed reporting to this post.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is back after taking a short break. 

Here’s who is testifying next:

Fake electors for Donald Trump were trying to convene so covertly, that some in Michigan wanted to “hide overnight” so they could be in the statehouse to sign certificates for Donald Trump, the House Select Committee revealed on Tuesday.

One Trump supporter “told me that the Michigan Republican electors were planning to meet in the Capitol and hide overnight so they could fulfill their role,” Laura Cox, a Michigan Republican Party official, told the House in her taped deposition. “I told him in no uncertain terms that that was insane and inappropriate.”

Trump electors were not needed in states he lost, because Biden electors were submitted to the federal government for the Electoral College. But Trump’s electors still convened in December 2021, signing documents in some battleground states saying that they were the rightful electors. Some believed the documents needed to be signed in state Capitol buildings so they could withstand court challenges, if elected officials were to try to throw the election to Trump.

But the need for secrecy has raised new questions about the plot, which is under investigation by criminal prosecutors as well as by the House Select Committee.

CNN previously reported how in Georgia, the Trump campaign encouraged Republican electors to convene with “complete secrecy.”

The approach was used in other states, too. Wisconsin — another state where Trump put forward fake electors after his loss — the electors also met in secret, CNN previously reported. One Trump elector in Wisconsin said the secrecy was for security reasons, though the Wisconsin Republican Party disputed that those electors met secretly.

US Sen. Ron Johnson leaves after a vote at the US Capitol in August 2021.

The House select committee on Tuesday unveiled new information showing the role that Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson played in pushing “fake” electors for Donald Trump on Jan. 6, 2021.

A Johnson aide texted a staffer to former Vice President Mike Pence that the Wisconsin Republican wanted to hand-deliver “fake” electors to Pence just before the start of the Jan. 6 congressional session to certify Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

The committee showed text messages Johnson aide Sean Riley sent to Pence aide Chris Hodgson, saying that Johnson “needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise.” 

After the hearing, Johnson told CNN he has “no idea” who tried to get him to share the fake electors from Michigan and Wisconsin to Pence and he acknowledged he was aware of the ask on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021.

“I was aware that we got this package and that somebody wanted us to deliver it, so we reached out to Pence’s office,” he said.

Asked who tried to give him the alternate slate of electors, Johnson said: “I have no idea.”

The messages between the aides, which have not been previously disclosed, show that Johnson was playing a role in the effort to put forward “fake” Trump electors that had not been certified by any state legislatures.  

The messages were exchanged just after 12:30 p.m. ET on Jan. 6, according to the committee, minutes before Pence gaveled the joint session of Congress at 1 p.m. ET —and rioters began breaching the Capitol to disrupt the certification.

Chair Bennie Thompson says the committee has “not yet” reached out to Johnson amid the revelations of his involvement in the fake elector scheme. 

“The committee hasn’t made a decision” on whether to call him to testify, Thompson said.

Asked if the fake elector scheme was criminal, Thompson said: “We are just presenting the facts.”

CNN’s Manu Raju contributed reporting to this post.

The Jan. 6 committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol is taking a short break in today’s hearing.

The panel is focusing on how former President Donald Trump and his allies pressured officials in key battleground states as they sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election. This is the committee’s fourth hearing this month as they present findings from their investigation.

So far, the panel has heard live testimony from Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers about how he was pressured by Trump and his allies to help him win.

Next, the committee is expected to hear from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his chief operating officer Gabe Sterling as well as Fulton County, Georgia, election worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss.

Here are the key moments you might have missed so far:

Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona statehouse, gave emotional testimony Tuesday about the impact his role defying the scheme to overturn the election results in his state had on him and his family, describing “disturbing” protests outside his home and, at one point, reading a passage from his personal journal about friends who had turned on him. 

Appearing at the fourth public hearing of the House Select Committee, Bowers welled up as he discussed the impact protests at this house had on his wife and his daughter, who was at home gravely ill at the time and was “upset by what was happening outside.”

“It is the new pattern or a pattern in our lives to worry what will happen on Saturdays because we have various groups come by,” Bowers said. “They had video panel trucks with video of me, proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician.”

On one occasion, Bowers said, the protesters included an armed man who appeared to be associated with the far-right militant group the Three Percenters.

“There was one gentleman that had the three bars on his chest and he had a pistol and was threatening my neighbor,” Bowers said.

Earlier, reading from a December 2020 entry he’d made in his personal journal, Bowers grew emotional as he described losing friends as a result of his position and how his faith helped him make decisions.

“It is painful to have friends who have been such a help to me turn on me with such rancor,” Bowers said.

“I may, in the eyes of men, not hold correct opinions or act according to their vision or convictions, but I do not take this current situation in a light manner, a fearful manner, or a vengeful manner. I do not want to be a winner by cheating,” he said.

Hear Bowers read his diary entry from December 2020 amid Trump’s pressure campaign:

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Rusty Bowers speaks to the committee on Tuesday.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers told the Jan. 6 House select committee that former Trump attorney John Eastman asked him to “decertify the electors” — and Bowers refused.

Bowers said it would be “counter to my oath.” 

“He said ‘well … my suggestion would be just do it and let the courts figure it all out. And he didn’t use that exact phrase, but that was what he, his meaning was. And I declined, and I believe that was close to the end of our phone call,” Bowers said.

Bowers also said he told former President Donald Trump a few days earlier that he would not do anything illegal for him.

Jacob Chansley, second from left, is seen inside the Arizona state Capitol in video shown by the committee on Tuesday.

The House select committee played new video on Tuesday of Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” which Rep. Adam Schiff said showed him “illegally” entering the Arizona state Capitol building before Jan. 6, 2021, and refusing to leave.

The video, according Schiff, is meant to highlight how individuals tied to the riot on January 6 were tied to prior incidents at state capitols across the country.

In the video, Chansley stood at the front of a small crowd in the same distinct outfit he wore to the US Capitol on Jan. 6. Chansley pointed forward and appeared to shout.

Chansley pleaded guilty in September to a felony charge for obstructing the Electoral College proceedings at the US Capitol on Jan. 6. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison. 

He has not been charged in connection with protests at the Arizona state Capitol.

Pictures of Chansley at the US Capitol went viral because of his bizarre appearance while leading others through the Capitol, shouting into a bullhorn.

As one of the first 30 rioters inside the building, he made his way to the Senate dais that was hastily vacated earlier by then-Vice President Mike Pence, and left a note that read, “It’s Only A Matter Of Time. Justice Is Coming!” according to his plea documents.

Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs urged Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers to throw out Biden electors and replace them with Trump electors on the morning of January 6.

Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, urged Arizona GOP House Speaker Rusty Bowers to throw out Biden electors and replace them with Trump electors on the morning of Jan. 6.

Bowers told the House Select Committee on Tuesday that Biggs called him the morning of Jan. 6 asking him to sign a letter from his state and support the decertification of Arizona’s electors.

“He asked if I would sign on both to a letter that had been sent from my state and/or that I would support the decertification of the electors,” Bowers said. “And I said I would not.”

Biggs was one of several Republican members of Congress who took part in former President Donald Trump’s efforts to try to overturn the election. Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, connected the White House with Pennsylvania state legislators as well as a Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who embraced Trump’s false claims of fraud.

The call Bowers received from Biggs, which had not been previously disclosed, came after he had already been pressured both by Trump and Trump attorney John Eastman, who put forward the theory to throw out electors in states Trump lost.

Rep. Adam Schiff, who was questioning Bowers, pointed to a statement Bowers released on Dec. 4, 2020, saying that Trump and Rudy Giuliani had come to Arizona making a “breathtaking request” for the state legislature to overturn the election results.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testifies on Tuesday.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers told the Jan. 6 committee that Rudy Giuliani and former President Trump were asking him for things that go “against my oath.”

Bowers said Trump and his allies had asked him for two things during a phone call: one was to hold an official committee hearing at the Capitol “so that they could hear this evidence and we could take action hereafter.” He said Giuliani never provided evidence of voting fraud and Bowers refused to allow the hearing because he didn’t want to be part of “the circus” and didn’t “want to be used as a pawn.”

Bowers said Giuliani’s second request was to remove electors of President Joe Biden and replace them. “I said, that’s totally new to me. I’ve never heard of any such thing,” Bowers told the committee during his testimony as he recounted the moment.

“I said look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it, and I also swore to the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona,” Bowers said. “This is totally foreign as an idea or a theory, to me, and I would never do anything of such magnitude without deep consultation with qualified attorneys.”

Bowers said that the requests not only went against his oath, but also went against his “most basic foundational beliefs.”

“There was no evidence being presented of any strength,” he said. “Anything that would say to me you have a doubt, deny your oath. I will not do that,” he added.

Watch:

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Cleta Mitchell, who advised former President Donald Trump’s legal team after the 2020 election, told the Jan. 6 committee that there were discussions about legislators being able to overturn the election results around the time of the 2020 election.

“Right after the election, it might have been before the election,” Mitchell said, according to video of her deposition played during the committee hearing.

In a Nov. 5, 2020, email that Mitchell sent to Trump attorney John Eastman, she asked Eastman: “What would you think of producing a legal memo outlining the constitutional role of state legislators in designating electors?” 

The email was previously disclosed by the committee in court filings.

In a video during the hearing, the committee showed testimony and new materials detailing the extent of the pressure campaign against state legislative leaders that played out in key states that Trump lost, including Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Michigan State Senate Majority leader Mike Shirkey, in video of his deposition, recalled a conversation he had with Trump where he told the former President, “We were going to follow the law.”

Shirkey said he remembered receiving 4,000 text messages in a short period of time from Trump supporters calling for action to change the state’s electors.

“They were believing things that were untrue,” Shirkey said.

The committee played audio of a voicemail from a Trump campaign official telling representatives, “You do have the power to reclaim your authority to send a slate of electors that will support President Trump and Vice President Pence.”

Rusty Bowers, a Republican and Arizona state House speaker, testified before the committee that key Trump ally Rudy Giuliani said he had evidence of widespread voter fraud, but “never” provided it.

Bowers, who is a witness at today’s hearing, described a phone call he took with former President Donald Trump and Giuliani in which Giuliani claimed to have evidence of fraud.

Bowers said he asked Giuliani “on multiple occasions” for proof of the fraud allegations.

“He said that they did have proof,” Bowers said, describing the exchange. “I asked him, ‘Do you have names?’” He told committee members Giuliani said that he did and would provide them to him.

But ultimately, according to Bowers, that didn’t happen.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff asked Bowers, “Did you ever receive from him that evidence, either during the call, after the call, or to this day?”

Bowers replied simply: “Never.”

The Arizona House speaker also told the committee that during another conversation with him, Giuliani said, “we’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”

“I don’t know if that was a gaffe or maybe he didn’t think through what he said, but both myself and others … remembered that specifically, and afterwards, we kind of laughed about it,” he said.

Watch:

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Josh Roselman, investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 House select committee, is shown Tuesday on video.

Josh Roselman, investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 House select committee, outlined how people in former President Trump’s circle incessantly called state officials in an effort to block the election results prior to the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

In late 2020, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and other Trump associates started to send messages — sometimes daily — to Republican state lawmakers asking them to discuss the election and urging them to give their electoral votes to Trump.

Trump’s allies made phone calls, sent texts and left voicemails to push the baseless claim that state legislators could overturn the election outcome.

“He posted multiple messages on Facebook listing the contact information for state officials and urging his supporters to contact them to quote, “demand a vote on the decertification.’ In one of those posts, President Trump disclosed [Michigan State Sen.] Mike Shirkey’s personal phone number to his millions of followers,” Roselman said.

Pennsylvania State Speaker Bryan Cutler said Giuliani repeatedly tried to reach out to him, and longtime Trump political adviser Steve Bannon announced protests at Cutler’s office and home.

During the first protest, Cutler said his teen son was home alone.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers testifies on Tuesday.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers said under oath Tuesday that former President Donald Trump lied about him in a press release that came out shortly before the hearing, where Trump claimed that Bowers told him that he believed the 2020 election was rigged.

Rusty Bowers directly refuted portions of a statement released earlier this afternoon by the former president, testifying under oath that he never referred to the 2020 election as rigged to “anyone, anywhere, anytime.” 

Trump’s statement said: “In November 2020, Bowers thanked me for getting him elected. He said he would have lost, and in fact expected to lose, if I hadn’t come along. During the conversation, he told me that the election was rigged and that I won Arizona… Bowers should hope there’s not a tape of the conversation.”

Bowers was asked about Trump’s statement by Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and said his counselor had called to read it to him by phone shortly before the hearing began. 

“There are parts of it that are true, there are parts of it that are not true,” Bowers told Schiff.

“…Anywhere, anyone anytime who has said that I said the election was rigged – that would not be true,” he continued.

The back-and-forth harkens back to Trump’s infamous conversations with former FBI Director James Comey in 2017, where Trump lied about what they discussed and raised the specter of “tapes.”

Like Bowers, Comey testified to Congress, under penalty of perjury, about the conversations with Trump.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers is testifying before the committee.

Rusty Bowers, a Republican and Arizona state House speaker, is testifying now about former President Donald Trump’s pressure on state officials to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.

Bowers, who supported Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, refused to bow to intimidation and attempts to get him to back efforts in the legislature to decertify Biden’s victory in Arizona.

He previously described how Trump and the then-President’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani called him after the 2020 election to convince him to somehow involve the legislature in the state’s certification process before sending its presidential electors to Congress.

This past year, Bowers also shot down some of his fellow Arizona Republicans’ more extreme election ideas, including a resolution of mostly debunked claims of fraud that called for the election results to be set aside in three Arizona counties.

In February, the Republican speaker used a parliamentary maneuver to effectively doom a GOP bill which would have overhauled elections in Arizona, including by giving the state legislature the power to reject election results it didn’t like.

Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, said the same people who were pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes were also working to pressure state election officials.

“Donald Trump had a direct and personal role in this effort as did Rudy Giuliani, as did John Eastman,” Cheney said in her opening remarks at today’s hearing. “In other words, the same people who were attempting to pressure vice president Mike Pence to reject electoral votes illegally were also simultaneously working to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election at the state level.”

“Each deserves attention both by Congress and by our Department of Justice,” Cheney said.

At its third hearing of the month last week, the committee tried to connect Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to the violence on Jan. 6 by weaving together testimony from Pence aides, Trump’s public statements and comments from rioters at the Capitol.  The committee showed Trump was told repeatedly that his plan for Pence to overturn the election was illegal, but he tried to do it anyway.  

Cheney said these pressure campaigns were both done for a broader purpose and “all of this was done in preparation for Jan. 6.”

She reiterated the committee’s point that Trump had been told that there was no basis for his election fraud claims.

Cheney played a clip of former attorney general William Barr in a recorded deposition saying the claims had “no merit.”

“We took a look, hard look at this ourselves, and based on our review of it, including the interviews of the key witnesses, the Fulton county allegations were… had no merit. The ballots under the table were legitimate ballots. They weren’t in a suitcase,” Barr said in the video.

Some context: At a previous committee hearing, BJay Pak, the former US attorney for the North District of Georgia, testified that his office found that the alleged “suitcase full of ballots” in Georgia was an official lockbox.

US Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman, gives opening remarks during Tuesday's hearing.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, said that pressuring election officials was a “fundamental part” of former President Trump’s strategy to block the 2020 election results.

“Pressuring public servants into betraying their oath was a fundamental part of the playbook,” Thompson said.  

While Trump focused on a few states to overturn the election results, officials would not go along with his allegations of fraud, Thompson said.

“When they wouldn’t embrace ‘the big lie’ and substitute the will of the voters, with Donald Trump’s will to remain in power, Donald Trump worked to ensure they faced the consequences,” he said, referring to the threats that election officials received in the wake of the 2020 election.

Thompson added that “the lie hasn’t gone away, saying that “people who believe that lie are now seeking positions of public trust.”

US Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee chairman, gives opening remarks during Tuesday's hearing.

Jan. 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson warned that former President Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election continue to corrupt America’s democratic institutions.

“People who believe that lie are now seeking positions of public trust. And as seen in New Mexico, their oath to the people they serve will take a backseat to their commitment to the big lie. If that happens, who will make sure our institutions don’t break under the pressure?” he said at the beginning of the hearing.

Watch:

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GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee vice chair, said at the opening of today’s hearing that former President Donald Trump was aware of the potential for violence ahead of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but that did not deter him from continuing to spread lies about the election results.

Cheney previewed how the committee will show how Trump was given warnings over threats and potential violence.

“You will hear about a number of threats and efforts to pressure state officials to reverse the election outcome. One of our witnesses today — Gabriel Sterling — explicitly warned President Trump about potential violence on December 1, 2020, more than a month before January 6. You will see excerpts from that video repeatedly today,” she said.

Sterling, chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State, is one of the witnesses for today’s hearing.

Cheney also asked those watching to “focus on the evidence,” adding, “we cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence.”  

Watch:

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In opening statements Tuesday, Chair Bennie Thompson said the democratic process remains under threat, citing how county-level leaders in New Mexico – including one convicted of trespassing Capitol grounds on January 6, 2021 – refused to certify a recent primary, citing election lies promulgated by former President Donald Trump. 

Thompson is referring to the New Mexico Otero county commission’s vote to refuse to certify the June 7 primary results. The commission, led by three GOP members, cited a distrust of Dominion voting machines, repeating the false conspiracy theory peddled by President Trump’s legal team. 

One of the members of the commission, Couy Griffin, the founder of “Cowboys for Trump,” was convicted in March by a federal judge of illegally trespassing on the Capitol grounds during the riot. In the attack, Griffin climbed over walls and police barriers before walking up to the inauguration stage for President-elect Joe Biden. 

After the state Supreme Court ordered the commission to certify the primary results by June 17, the commission relented with only Griffin – an ardent conspiracy theorist – voting against the certification. 

When Couy was sentenced on Friday to 14 days behind bars with time served, he reiterated his claims against Dominion voting machines and said he would not vote to certify the election until there was a hand count of the ballots. 

Voting rights advocates have expressed concern over the commission’s initial defiance, concerned that the same thing could happen in other parts of the country where election falsehoods have taken root. 

“The lie hasn’t gone away,” Thompson said. “It’s corrupting our democratic institutions” and could end in “catastrophe” if the democratic institutions don’t hold. 

US Rep. Adam Schiff listens to testimony during Thursday's hearing.

Jan. 6 committee member Rep. Adam Schiff is presenting additional findings during the panel’s fourth hearing this month.

CNN previously reported that Schiff was expected to play a leading role in Tuesday’s hearing.

Schiff is a Democrat from California and serves as chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

He was the lead impeachment manager representing Democrats during former President Trump’s first impeachment trial.

“The former President and his allies have spent every day since January 6 attempting to rewrite history about that bloody attack on our nation’s Capitol. That’s why these public hearings are so essential — to show the American people exactly how January 6 came about, who is responsible, and most critically, what we can and must do to prevent another attack on our democracy.”

Read about the other Jan. 6 committee members here.

The recorded testimony of former Attorney General Bill Barr, center, was shown again on Tuesday.

After the 2020 election, senior Justice Department officials told then-President Donald Trump that he lost Georgia fair and square, and debunked his conspiracy theories about the Georgia election to his face, according to new testimony revealed Tuesday during the Jan. 6 select committee hearing. 

Barr added, “There was no evidence of subterfuge… we didn’t see any evidence of fraud.” This was the latest in a series of clips the committee has played of Barr debunking Trump’s election-related conspiracy theories.

Almost the entire city of Atlanta is in Fulton County, and Trump repeatedly claimed that there were irregularities and illegal voting in the city, even though there was no evidence to back up his claims.

Richard Donoghue, who was the acting deputy Attorney General after Barr stepped down in December 2020, also told the committee about his conversations with Trump about Georgia. He told the committee that he said to the president, “sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed.”

Three witnesses are seated before Tuesday's hearing. From left are Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Raffensperger's chief operating officer Gabe Sterling.

The House select committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol has begun its fourth hearing of the month. 

The panel is expected to focus on how former President Donald Trump and his allies pressured officials in key battleground states as they sought to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Committee aides said the hearing will also demonstrate how Trump and his allies concocted a scheme to submit fake slates of electors.

The committee will hear live testimony from four witnesses in two separate panels.

Panel one:

Panel two:

The committee plans to show video testimony of depositions from officials in other states where Trump and his allies pressured state-level officials to try to block Biden’s election win.

Heading into the hearing, Jan. 6 committee chair Bennie Thompson told CNN that the panel will reveal information on Republican members who sought pardons from former President Donald Trump “over the next few weeks.” He said it won’t come out today.

The committee has accused GOP Rep. Scott Perry of seeking a pardon, something he has denied, and has promised more information about pardon requests from multiple Republicans.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol turns its attention Tuesday to the campaign to pressure state-level officials to overturn the 2020 election results.

The hearing will focus in particular on then-President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results in Arizona and in Georgia — where Trump infamously asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win.

Committee aides said the witnesses testifying in person on Tuesday from Arizona and Georgia will be able to speak to the pressure campaign that came from the White House, as well as the backlash they received from Trump’s supporters.

The witnesses from Georgia include Raffensperger and his chief operating officer, Gabe Sterling, both of whom faced relentless attacks from Trump after certifying the state’s election. Fulton County election worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who was falsely accused by Trump of ballot fraud, will also testify about the backlash she faced.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, will testify about the pressure he received from Trump and Giuliani, according to committee aides.

Here are key things to watch for during today’s hearing:

The Meadows connection: Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee member who will lead Tuesday’s hearing, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday that the hearing would show how Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had played an “intimate role” in the efforts to pressure Georgia state legislators and election officials.

The California Democrat said the committee would release new text messages showing that Meadows had wanted to send autographed “Make America Great Again” hats to those conducting Georgia’s post-election audit.

Committee aides said the hearing would “demonstrate his involvement” in Georgia in the run-up to Jan. 6.

Meadows reached out multiple times to Raffensperger after the 2020 election, according to text messages obtained by CNN, and he participated in Trump’s January 2021 call where the former President asked Raffensperger to “find” the votes the then-President needed to win.

While that call was going on, Meadows was texting with the deputy secretary of state, who urged him to end the call that now stands at the center of Fulton County’s investigation into whether any of the actions Trump or his allies took related to Georgia’s election were criminal.

Testimony from those who faced backlash from Trump’s attacks: The witnesses will be able to testify firsthand on Tuesday about the impact of Trump’s pressure campaign and false claims about the election — as they all were subjected to attacks and threats.

Aides said that Bowers, the Arizona secretary of state, will be able to testify about the “campaign of harassment” he was subjected to in the run-up to January 6 and the months that followed.

Raffensperger and Sterling were attacked by Trump and his allies for certifying Georgia’s election. Sterling warned in a December 2020 news conference that “it’s all gone too far” after local election officials had been subjected to threats and harassment.

Moss, who was a Fulton County election worker in 2020, will testify how her mother’s and her lives were upended and they were forced to go into hiding after Moss was accused by Trump of carrying out a fake ballot scheme, according to committee aides. She and another election worker sued Giuliani last year.

In her written testimony provided on Monday, Moss said the false stories accusing her of taking part in voter fraud had led to her receiving death threats.

Keep reading here.

US Rep. Adam Schiff attends one of last week's hearings.

Rep. Adam Schiff told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday that the Jan. 6 committee has evidence former President Donald Trump was involved in the fake electors effort, and CNN is told the committee will present a multilayered pressure campaign in their hearing today. The key word: coordination.

It was Trump, former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, and the lawyers who helped undercut the election — like Jenna Ellis and others — who coordinated a misinformation campaign and pushed it to the state legislatures in the key states and not members of Congress who were going to vote on Jan. 6, 2021.

The committee has talked to some of the alternate (fake) electors as well. In the hearing today, the committee is expected to play taped sound bites from at least one of the fake electors the administration targeted.

British filmmaker Alex Holder acknowledged Tuesday that he has complied with a subpoena from the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, turning over footage that includes never-before-seen interviews with former President Donald Trump, members of the Trump family and then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Holder, who was filming a documentary series surrounding the final six weeks of Trump’s re-election campaign, wrote in a statement Tuesday that the interviews were filmed before and after the events of Jan. 6. 

Holder also says he will be deposed by the committee on Thursday. Politico first reported the committee’s subpoena of Holder. A Select Committee spokesperson declined to comment.

Senior Trump campaign officials were caught off guard when they learned that the British filmmaker was given extensive access in the final weeks of President Trump’s 2020 campaign, several told CNN.

The first time senior campaign staff heard of the documentary was when it was reported by Politico Tuesday morning, according to one of the senior staffers. Another senior official on the campaign told CNN he was totally unaware Trump was cooperating with Holder, who says he has complied with a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee to share his footage.

This aide, who traveled often with the President and worked out of his Arlington, Virginia, campaign headquarters, said he was also never asked to sign anything granting his permission to be filmed. 

“I don’t remember it. I honestly don’t recall ever being told about something like that,” the official said. 

“The first time senior 2020 campaign leadership ever heard of the documentary was this morning’s Politico Playbook,” another added. 

Stephanie Grisham, who was chief of staff to former first lady Melania Trump during the campaign, told CNN she “had no idea” a filmmaker was documenting Trump’s reelection campaign and final days in the White House. 

A third campaign official also said the committee’s subpoena of a documentary filmmaker who was cooperating with Trump was news to him even though he spent most of his time on the campaign trail with the candidate himself. 

“I heard about it in passing,” said a third Trump campaign official, who is now involved in Trump’s post-presidential operation. “It wasn’t necessarily a secret.” 

Two attorneys for Trump’s 2020 campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

Today’s hearing is focusing on a part of the Jan. 6 attack that is now an active part of the Justice Department investigation that goes beyond the rioters.

While members of the Jan. 6 committee have voiced frustration at Attorney General Merrick Garland for the pace of the federal criminal probe, this part of the sprawling Justice Department investigation has picked up pace in recent weeks with CNN reporting on multiple subpoenas issued to people involved in the fake electors scheme.

The FBI and Department of Justice prosecutors appear to be zeroing in on lawyers for the Trump campaign and a few other close advisers, in addition to those who served as Trump electors themselves.

Witnesses have been asked for communications between so-called alternate electors and notable names such as former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, campaign lawyer Justin Clark, and John Eastman.

A lot of this activity seems to be an effort by the Justice Department to make sure their investigative actions don’t interfere with the midterm elections.

Today’s Jan. 6 committee hearing will include information about how at least one Republican member of Congress pressured at least one state to overturn its election results, three sources familiar with the matter told CNN.

Overall, the testimony today of the four witnesses will feature a key theme: how the election-fraud conspiracies and lies led to threats to the witnesses’ personal safety — as the committee tries to show the real world consequences of the former President’s words, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter.

The testimony from the state officials also will underscore the idea pushed by the committee that the country was dangerously close to a real constitutional crisis, but a few principled people withstood the pressure and prevented that from happening.

A key part of the testimony today will feature the pressure on Rusty Bowers, the Republican Arizona House speaker who backed former President Donald Trump in 2020, but would not give in to his pressure campaign. Trump and his allies repeatedly promised proof of widespread fraud, but Bowers has indicated that he never received the evidence they claimed to have, the source said.

US Rep. Adam Kinzinger listens during Thursday's hearing.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the Capitol riot, said Sunday he thinks the committee is presenting a case against former President Trump that would “rise to a level of criminal involvement,” while also making clear that the Justice Department will ultimately decide whether to bring criminal charges for what happened on and leading up to Jan. 6, 2021.

“Obviously, you know, we’re not a criminal charges committee. So I want to be careful in specifically using that language, but I think what we’re presenting before the American people certainly would rise to a level of criminal involvement by a president and definitely failure of the oath,” he added.

CNN has reported committee members are in wide agreement that Trump committed a crime when he pushed a conspiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. But they are divided over whether to make a criminal referral of Trump to the Justice Department, according to four sources connected to the panel.

The Illinois Republican reiterated this week’s hearings will focus on Trump’s efforts to push state officials to overturn 2020 election results, as well as a broader pressure campaign to involve the Justice Department in his scheme.

He said the committee’s purpose is to lay out Trump’s actions to the American people, and “what can the Department of Justice do in a court of law…that’s up to them. They can, you know, have their own information, they’ll be able to see what we’re doing here.”

ABC’s George Stephanopoulos said Kinzinger’s staff shared threatening communications with ABC News that the congressman had received that was too “ugly” and “dangerous” to share with viewers on screen.

Kinzinger explained the message was mailed to his house a few days ago from the local area, threatening to execute him, his wife and their five-month-old child.

“I don’t worry, but now that I have a wife and kids, of course, it’s a little different,” he said. “There is violence in the future. I’m going to tell you. And until we get a grip on telling people the truth, we can’t expect any differently,” he said.

Former Vice President Mike Pence attends a roundtable discussion in Cincinnati on Thursday.

Former Vice President Mike Pence has rescheduled his planned Tuesday visit with the Republican Study Committee on Capitol Hill due to a “scheduling conflict,” according to a GOP source familiar with the situation. 

The conservative group was informed of Pence’s scheduling conflict sometime last week, the source said, and the meeting will now take place in July.

Had Pence appeared on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, it would have made for somewhat awkward timing, as the Jan. 6 select committee is in the middle of public hearings about former President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the election.

Last Thursday’s hearing in particular, focused on how Trump tried to pressure Pence to join in his scheme to overturn the election — and how his refusal put his life in danger as rioters called for his hanging on Jan. 6, 2021.

Pence has not spoken to the committee but a number of his aides have, with some of them appearing for taped depositions and others testifying in a public hearing last week. 

The New York Times was the first to report that Pence’s visit has been rescheduled.

US Rep. Jamie Raskin attends the first public hearing on June 9.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said there needs to be “accountability” for the wrongdoing displayed in evidence and testimony in the House select committee investigating the 2020 attack at the Capitol— but stopped short of lobbying the Department of Justice to charge former President Trump.

Raskin said in an NBC interview on Sunday the goal of the committee’s hearings is in part to bring “individual criminal accountability” for people who committed crimes and “collective accountability” for the nation to help protect from future attacks on the US government.

“But accountability also means collective accountability, and that’s the real project,” Raskin continued. “Telling the truth to the people so we can make decisions about how to fortify democratic institutions going forward.”

Raskin was pressed on whether he feels Attorney General Merrick Garland should be paying particular attention to recent statements from Trump about Jan. 6, but said he feels Garland should concentrate on the facts and deferred on whether to prosecute the former president to the Department of Justice.

“The attorney general really shouldn’t be reacting to particular provocations by particular politicians or criminals,” Raskin said. “I mean, that’s not really the role of the attorney general.”

At a political conference in Nashville on Friday, Trump lashed out at the Jan. 6 committee and former Vice President Mike Pence, notably saying Pence “did not have the courage” to overturn the electoral college votes in the joint session of Congress.

US Rep. Adam Schiff appears on CNN's "State of the Union."

The House Jan. 6 committee will show evidence at its upcoming hearing about then-President Donald Trump’s involvement in a scheme to submit fake slates of electors in the 2020 presidential election, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the panel, said Sunday.

Federal prosecutors are reviewing the fake Electoral College certifications created by Trump allies that falsely declared him the winner of seven states that he lost in 2020. The fake certificates were sent to the National Archives in the weeks after the election and had no impact on the electoral outcome.

When asked by Bash specifically if the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol had evidence Trump directed the fake electors scheme, Schiff responded, “I don’t want to get ahead of our hearing.”

“We’ll show during the hearing what the President’s role was in trying to get states to name alternate slates of electors, how that scheme depended initially on hopes that the legislators would reconvene and bless it,” he said, adding, “We will show you what we know about his role in this.”

The committee’s upcoming hearing on Tuesday will also feature Georgia election officials and the Arizona House speaker who resisted pressure from Trump and his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results.

With regards to witnesses: Schiff also said the committee still has “several key people we have not interviewed we would like to” and could still possibly subpoena former Vice President Mike Pence as part of its investigation.

“(He’s) certainly a possibility,” Schiff said. “We’re not excluding anyone or anything at this point.”

Also Sunday, another House January 6 panelist said there needed to be “accountability” for the wrongdoing displayed in evidence and testimony before the select committee, but stopped short of calling on the Department of Justice to charge Trump.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “accountability can mean two things. One is individual criminal accountability that people pay for their particular crimes, as more than 800 people have already been prosecuted for everything from assaulting a federal officer to interfering with a federal proceeding to seditious conspiracy.”

“But accountability also means collective accountability, and that’s the real project,” he continued. “Telling the truth to the people so we can make decisions about how to fortify democratic institutions going forward.”

Meanwhile, when asked by Bash about the January 6 committee’s decision not to turn over documents related to its investigation to the DOJ, Schiff defended the panel’s stance, saying, “I don’t think Congress has ever done that.”

The Justice Department had raised concerns in court that the select committee had not shared transcripts and was jeopardizing its ability to prosecute and investigate the Jan. 6 events. Schiff said the committee will work with the DOJ and “want them to be successful in bringing people to justice, but I can’t go into the private conversations.”

Keep reading here.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers speaks after receiving the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in May.

Rusty Bowers, a Republican who is the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, is set to testify at Tuesday’s hearing held by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

Bowers will join Georgia’s election officials — Brad Raffensperger and Gabe Sterling — who will be part of a panel before the Jan. 6 committee detailing Trump’s campaign to force states to overturn their certified election results.

Bowers, who supported Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, refused to back efforts in the legislature to decertify President Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers poses for a portrait at the Capitol in Phoenix in October.

A Republican bill that would have overhauled elections in Arizona — including giving the state legislature the power to reject election results — proved to be too much even for state GOP leaders back in February.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, quietly doomed House Bill 2596  with an unusual parliamentary maneuver.

The speaker assigns all new bills to a committee for consideration before they can have full House votes, a choice that often has a great effect on a measure’s chance of success. But Bowers took the unprecedented step of ordering all 12 House committees to consider the elections bill, virtually ensuring it will never reach the floor.

The bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. John Fillmore, referred to the move as a “12-committee lynching” in an interview with CNN affiliate KPHO/KTVK.

At the time Bowers and Fillmore did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Under the bill, Arizona legislators would meet in a special session to review the ballot tabulating process for primary and general elections and decide whether to “accept or reject election results.” If the legislature rejected the results, “any qualified elector may file an action in the Superior Court to request that a new election be held,” the bill said.

Read more:

Rep. Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the House, poses for portraits at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix on Oct. 20, 2021. Rusty Bowers

Related article Arizona Republican House speaker effectively dooms GOP bill to allow state legislature to reject election results | CNN Politics

The January 6 committee, along with staff counsel John Wood, attend Thursday's public hearing.

The House Jan. 6 committee “won’t be an obstacle” to Department to Justice prosecutions, the committee spokesman said in a statement Friday.

The comment was in response to the Department of Justice’s concerns raised in court that the committee had not shared transcripts and was jeopardizing the DOJ’s ability to prosecute and investigate the events of Jan. 6, 2021.  

The New York Times reported on Friday that the committee could now share them as soon as early as July. Several weeks ago, prosecutors told a court they did not anticipate the committee sharing them until September.

The panel’s statement is the latest in a back and forth between the committee and the DOJ, where the DOJ is claiming that the panel is slowing its investigation by not sharing its transcripts, while the panel maintains it is not trying to stand in the way of the Justice Department’s investigation. 

Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the committee, told reporters on Thursday that the panel was not going to stop its work to share its materials with DOJ. 

“We are not going to stop what we are doing to share the information that we’ve gotten so far with the Department of Justice,” he said. “We have to do our work.”

Gabe Sterling addresses allegations of voter irregularities during a news conference in January 2021.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his deputy Gabe Sterling will testify publicly during Tuesday’s hearing held by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol.

The hearing will focus on how former President Donald Trump and his allies pressured officials in key battleground states as they sought to overturn the 2020 election, multiple sources said. 

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the committee, is expected to play a leading role in Tuesday’s hearing. 

The witness list for the hearing includes three individuals from Georgia: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his deputy Gabe Sterling and former election worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. 

Moss is slated to appear separately on a second panel, according to the committee’s hearing notice. She was accused by Trump and others of carrying out a fake ballot scheme in Fulton County, Georgia. The committee will hear firsthand about her experiences and the threats she says she received as a result of Trump’s false claims, committee aides said.

“We will show that the President was warned that these actions, including false claims of election fraud, pressuring state and local officials, risked violence,” the aide said, adding that Trump “did it anyway.”

In addition, committee aides said the panel plans to show the role Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows played in the pressure campaign led by Trump in these key states, “particularly in Georgia.” Aides said the committee also plans to present testimony from officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania about the Trump-led pressure campaign there.

Some context: Raffensperger’s profile grew after the 2020 election when he resisted Trump’s efforts to pressure him to “find” the votes necessary for Trump to win Georgia in an infamous January 2021 phone call.

The Georgia Republican has already spoken privately with the committee about his experience in addition to testifying before a special grand jury in a criminal probe into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the Peach State.

CNN has reached out to the Jan. 6 committee for comment. 

A spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. 

CNN’s Zachary Cohen, Annie Grayer and Jeremy Herb contributed reporting to this post.

An image of former Vice President Mike Pence is seen on above the January 6 committee during Thursday's hearing.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol wrapped up its third hearing of the month on Thursday. The panel presented evidence that outlined former President Donald Trump’s role in pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence into blocking the 2020 election results.

Through live testimony from former Pence attorney Greg Jacob and retired judge J. Michael Luttig, recorded depositions and excerpts from emails and memos, the committee showed that Trump was told the plan to reverse the results of the election was not legal — but he tried it anyway.

Here are the top headlines you might have missed:

Read key takeaways from the hearing:

Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. swears-in Greg Jacob, who was counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, center right, and Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge, to testify as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol holds a hearing at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 16, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Pool Photo via AP)

Related article 8 takeaways from the January 6 hearings day 3

The Republican who serves as Georgia’s top elections official is set to testify before the hearing held by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol, multiple sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

Brad Raffensperger, 66, is probably best known for refusing then-President Donald Trump’s push in a bombshell phone call to “find” votes in Trump’s favor needed to overturn the 2020 presidential results in Georgia. During the Jan. 2, 2021, call, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that he had won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud.

Raffensperger has continued to defend his performance and remains committed to the idea that the election was conducted fairly and offered a warning to those who charged otherwise without evidence.

It was among the strongest public stands for election integrity taken by a Republican under immense pressure from Trump and his followers — and it wasn’t without consequences.

“You and your family will be killed very slowly,” read one anonymous text that Raffensperger’s wife, Tricia, told Reuters in an exclusive interview last year that she had received, an example of the kinds of threats and scrutiny his family faced. Brad Raffensperger told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” at the time that the threats were unacceptable.

Raffensperger became a pariah of sorts within the GOP, facing calls for resignation from within his own party and censure at the Georgia GOP convention in 2021 due to “dereliction of his constitutional duty.”

“Let me start by saying that is not going to happen. The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me,” he said at the time in response to the calls for him to step down.

“As secretary of state, I’ll continue to fight every day to ensure fair elections in Georgia, that every legal vote counts and that illegal votes don’t count,” Raffensperger continued.

Raffensperger, whose term is set to end next year, is running for reelection. He faced three opponents in the primary election in May, and CNN projected Raffensperger would win andbe the GOP nominee.

His leading opponent, Republican Rep. Jody Hice, had aligned himself with Trump’s political brand and previously said Trump would’ve won the 2020 election in Georgia if it had been “fair” — a stance that garnered an endorsement from the former President.

In a primary field in which his Republican opponents had committed themselves to fighting voter fraud — despite the fact that such fraud barely exists and President Biden’s 2020 victory in the Peach State was affirmed by three ballot counts — Raffensperger has expressed commitment to the same issue.

Raffensperger has also supported a controversial law passed in the wake of Biden’s victory to impose new voting restrictions.

The secretary of state, who touts himself as a conservative Republican, took office in 2019. He had served two terms in the Georgia General Assembly in 2015-2019.

Read more about the official here.

Attorney General Merrick Garland attends a news conference last week.

Justice Department officials are watching the House select committee Jan. 6 hearings for what kind of possible crimes the committee believes it has uncovered. 

Members of the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol are in wide agreement that former President Donald Trump committed a crime when he pushed a conspiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. But they are split over what to do about it, sources close to the committee said.

It’s possible that at the end of the panel’s investigation, it makes criminal referrals or something less formal by turning over evidence that prosecutors could examine.  

Remember: A criminal referral is not an official responsibility of the Jan. 6 panel. And the DOJ would be under no legal obligation to act on the committee’s request, though it could force Attorney General Merrick Garland and his prosecutors into a difficult public position. 

At the same time, if the committee opts not to make a referral, it would likely miss its best chance of making a forceful statement that it believes Trump committed a crime. Choosing not to make a referral would also mean abdicating one of the committee’s only levers of political pressure at its disposal. 

During a hearing for the criminal case against the Proud Boys, Justice Department prosecutors said that the committee is planning to release all 1,000 witness transcripts from its investigation in early September, coinciding with the trial of five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the riot. 

Where the DOJ investigation stands: Seventeen months after the riot, the Justice Department has arrested over 840 individuals, charging roughly 255 with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers that day – 90 of whom are charged with using a weapon or causing serious injury to an officer. 

According to the Justice Department, over 50 defendants have been charged with conspiracy, ranging from conspiring to obstruct a congressional proceeding to conspiring to obstruct law enforcement. 

Sixteen individuals – members of the far-right groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – have been charged with seditious conspiracy for their alleged actions that day, three of whom have pleaded guilty to the charge. 

But the investigation is not close to being over. The Justice Department is still looking for over 350 individuals who they say “committed violent acts on Capitol grounds.” 

Most recently: A Capitol rioter pleaded guilty Friday to carrying a loaded firearm on Capitol grounds and assaulting police officers with one of their own batons during the Jan. 6 attack.

Mark Mazza told federal investigators he regretted not seeing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the riot and that they would be talking “for another reason” if he had seen her. He faces a maximum of 20 years for assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon.  

According to the plea agreement, Mazza, 57, carried a revolver loaded with shotgun and hollow point rounds in a holster under his shirt during the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot and on Capitol grounds later that day.  

Former President Donald Trump is displayed on a screen above the committee on Thursday.

The fourth Jan. 6 hearing this month is about to start. Here are some key points to catch up on before the next hearing gets underway.

Former President Trump didn’t want the Capitol riot to stop

During the committee’s first prime-time hearing, it revealed testimony from Trump White House officials who said the former president did not want the US Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop. He angrily resisted his advisers urging him to call off the rioters and thought his own vice president “deserved” to be hanged, according to the testimony.

Vice Chair Liz Cheney described a witness who said Trump was aware of chants to “hang Mike Pence” and seemed to approve of them.

Later, at the hearing last week, the committee sought to connect Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to the violence on Jan. 6 by weaving together testimony from Pence aides, as well as Trump’s public statements and comments from rioters at the Capitol.

Many of the rioters had listened to Trump’s rallies where he claimed — inaccurately — that the election was rigged against him, and Pence had the power to do something about it while presiding over the Electoral College certification, the committee said.

And many of them saw, in real time, Trump’s tweet criticizing Pence while the Capitol was under attack, where he said Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

The committee showed that the mob got about 40 feet from Pence.

John Eastman knew his theory to overturn the election was illegal

The hearing underscored how John Eastman, a former Trump attorney, had pushed over and over for Pence to try to overturn the election, despite facing sharp resistance from White House lawyers and Pence’s team.

The committee showed memos in which Eastman laid out his theory. Witnesses from Pence’s legal team testified that there was nothing in the Constitution or US law that supported the scheme. The committee played testimony from video depositions where White House officials explained how they thought Eastman’s theory was “nutty” before Jan. 6 — and told him so. Former Pence attorney Greg Jacob described Eastman’s plans as “certifiably crazy.”

On the evening of Jan. 6 — after rioters had attacked the Capitol and forced the vice president and his team to flee — Eastman tried to leverage the delay in certification by arguing there had been a minor violation of the Electoral Count Act and Pence should delay for 10 days as a result.

Jacob also testified that Eastman told him that he knew the theory would lose at the Supreme Court unanimously. Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani a few days after Jan. 6 and asked to be included on a list of potential recipients of a presidential pardon, the committee said.

Trump was told Eastman’s plan was illegal but tried it anyway

According to witness testimony, Pence himself and the lawyer who concocted the scheme advised Trump directly that the plan was unconstitutional and violated federal law. Committee members argued that this shows Trump’s corrupt intentions and could lay the groundwork for a potential indictment.

In a videotaped deposition, which was played Thursday, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short said Pence advised Trump “many times” that he didn’t have the legal or constitutional authority to overturn the results while presiding over the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to count the electoral votes.

Even Eastman, who pitched the scheme to Trump, admitted in front of Trump that the plan would require Pence to violate federal law, according to a clip of a deposition from Jacob.

Legal scholars from across the political spectrum agree that Eastman’s plan was preposterous. J. Michael Luttig, the former federal judge who advised Pence during the transition, testified that he “would have laid my body across the road” before letting Pence illegally overturn the election.

Committee argues Trump peddled fraud claims after he was personally told they were not legitimate

One of the primary areas of focus of the committee has been to underscore the idea that Trump and some of his allies continued to peddle false claims of election fraud after they were personally told those claims were not legitimate.

The committee made the argument that Trump was repeatedly told by his own top officials, including former Attorney General William Barr and ex-Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, that the myriad of fraud claims he was pushing were groundless and were certainly not evidence that the election was stolen.

Yet, Trump and some of his allies continued to push these false claims all the way through January in what the committee attempted to show was a bad-faith effort to overturn the election despite consistently being told those claims were not valid.

Trump’s team and family turn against him

The committee’s first hearing was bolstered with never-before-seen video clips showing members of Trump’s White House and campaign – as well as his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner – speaking about how they didn’t believe Trump’s claims that the election was stolen.

Barr said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were “bullshit.” Ivanka Trump said that she respected Barr and “accepted what he was saying” about the election.

Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said a campaign data staffer told Trump in “pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”

And the committee cited testimony from Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon, who testified he told Meadows by “mid-to-late November” that the campaign had come up empty trying to find widespread fraud in key states that Trump lost. Cannon said Meadows responded to his assessment by saying, “so there’s no there there.”

President Donald Trump speaks to supporters near the White House on January 6, 2021.

Throughout the 2020 campaign, former President Trump repeatedly lied about rampant voter fraud and claimed that the election would be “rigged” against him. He escalated this rhetoric after Election Day by falsely claiming victory, and continued pushing these lies after Biden became the projected President-elect.  

Trump’s campaign and his allies then filed dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits across the country, seeking to overturn the results, based on spurious fraud claims. Despite losing those lawsuits, Trump continued promoting these lies while pressuring federal, state, and local officials to help him stop the transition of power. These officials largely refused to help Trump with his plan.  

Trump repeated these lies during his Ellipse rally on Jan. 6, which helped spur the Capitol riot. Trump’s rhetoric inspired the vast majority of Republicans to believe that Biden did not win the 2020 election, according to CNN polling. Many of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol also expressed this view. 

The Jan. 6 committee has released testimony from Trump advisers revealing that he was told shortly after the election that he lost – but he kept pushing ahead with disinformation and false claims about the election. Some academics and historians have dubbed this phenomenon as “the Big Lie.” 

Supporters of then-President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is set to continue to lay out its findings during a public hearing this morning. When and how the events occurred that day have been a key part of their probe.

Supporters of then-President Trump breached the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, engulfing the building in chaos after Trump urged his supporters to protest against the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes to certify President Biden’s win.

Here’s how key events unfolded throughout the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, after Trump’s speech:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a statement earlier on the evening of Jan. 6 that congressional leadership wanted to continue with the joint session that night.

Then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the floor that the “United States Senate will not be intimidated. We will not be kept out of this chamber by thugs, mobs or threats.”

It took until deep in the early hours of Thursday morning (Jan. 7, 2021), but Congress eventually counted and certified Biden’s election win.

See the full timeline of events here.

The House committee, along with counsel John Wood, meets on Thursday.

Members of the House select committee have been investigating what happened before, after and during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — and now they are presenting what they discovered to the public.

The committee is holding another hearing Tuesday as it continues to roll out preliminary findings from its investigation in a series of presentations this month.

The committee is made up of 7 Democrats and 2 Republicans. It was formed after efforts to create an independent 9/11-style commission failed.

Rep. Liz Cheney is one of two Republicans on the panel appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from California, after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy pulled all five of his selections because Pelosi would not accept two of his picks. In July 2021, Pelosi invited GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois to join the committee, making him the second GOP lawmaker to sit on the panel.

Here’s who is on the panel — and key things to know about them:

Democrats:

Republicans