Jan. 6 committee holds eighth hearing

Jan. 6 committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, said at the opening of the hearing that the panel will continue to outline its findings to the American public in September.

"As that work goes forward, a number of facts are clear: there can be no doubt that there was a coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn an election overseen and directed by Donald Trump," he continued.

Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair of the committee, said that the panel will take a break from public hearings next month but resume in September.

“Our committee will spend August pursuing emerging information on multiple fronts, before convening further hearings this September,” Cheney said during her opening remarks.

More background: Committee members have said their investigation is ongoing. The hearings have so far elicited numerous revelations and led to new witnesses coming to Capitol Hill for closed-door depositions as recently as this week.

The panel has conducted eight public hearings so far, and has presented a substantial amount of evidence connecting former President Donald Trump to the deadly riot at the US Capitol, and highlighting his three-plus hours of inaction after his supporters started attacking the building that day.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol is starting its eighth public hearing.

The panel is expected to present evidence that focuses on the three-plus hours when then-President Donald Trump did not step in to stop the insurrection. A committee aide told CNN that the panel will lay out the inaction from Trump as the violence unfolded.

Two witnesses will testify in person, and both resigned in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack:

The committee is also expected to play additional taped footage from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone's deposition.

Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, who has Covid-19, appeared at Thursday’s hearing remotely. 

In remarks, Thompson said after calling for the crowd to go to the Capitol, "he stopped."

"For 187 minutes, on Jan. 6, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved — not by his aides, not by his allies, not by the violent chants of rioters or the desperate pleas of those facing down the riot," Thompson said, adding that he even disregarded pleas from his own family members.

"He could not be moved," Thompson said, referring to Trump's inaction and unwillingness to walk to the press briefing room and say something to stop the violence.

A source familiar with the matter tells CNN that the heads of both former President Donald Trump’s and former Vice President Mike Pence’s security details are among the 24 Secret Service personnel whose text messages were requested for review by the Department of Homeland Security inspector general. 

The Secret Service had been continuing to review both their communications to see if anything was deleted as they purged their phones during an agency-wide migration of phones.

Bobby Engel — the head of Trump’s detail — was in the SUV on Jan. 6, 2021 and is said to have stopped the former President from going to the Capitol, according to recent testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson. 

A source tells CNN the head of Pence’s detail — Tim Giebels — is also among the 24 Secret Service agents whose cell phones are under a fresh review after the inspector alerted Congress that text messages were lost due to a data migration. 

Giebels’ text messages may have captured the frantic effort to sweep Pence away from danger as rioters flooded a Capitol hallway yards from Pence, and other rioters called for his hanging outside the building. The texts could have offered a stark split-screen of Trump’s inaction in the face of grave danger to his No 2. 

The House Jan. 6 committee's final prime-time hearing Thursday will be all about 187 minutes.

That's the period of a little more than three hours as the riot unfolded in the US Capitol that the House select committee has argued then-President Donald Trump was derelict in his duties.

The committee says it plans to show, minute-by-minute, how Trump failed to make any effort to tell the rioters to leave the Capitol or to try to help lawmakers — and then-Vice President Mike Pence — as they were forced to flee the House and Senate chambers.

The 187 minutes began at 1:10 p.m. ET on Jan. 6, 2021, as Trump was wrapping up his speech at the Ellipse. This is when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol, so they could pressure lawmakers to overturn the election while they met for a joint session of Congress to formally certify President Biden's victory.

Exactly 187 minutes later, at 4:17 p.m. ET, Trump posted a video on Twitter. In the clip, he said for the first time that his supporters should leave the Capitol. He also heaped praise on the rioters and repeated his debunked lies about the election, which had spurred the riot in the first place.

Watch CNN's John King run through what we know about what happened during the 187 minutes:

The House committee investigating the insurrection plans to show footage at Thursday's hearing of then-President Donald Trump having difficulty working through efforts to tape a message to his supporters on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot, sources familiar with the committee's plans tell CNN.

The outtakes, first reported by The Washington Post, were part of production of a speech Trump gave the night after the riot. They show Trump having a difficult time working through the effort to tape the message. Trump refused to say the election results had been settled and attempted to call the rioters patriots. He also went to great lengths to not accuse them of any wrongdoing.

A spokesperson for the Jan. 6 select committee declined to comment on the outtakes.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who is a member of the committee, confirmed Wednesday night to CNN's Anderson Cooper that the panel has the outtakes and plans to share some of them during the hearing.

"The President displayed extreme difficulty in completing his remarks," Raskin said on "Anderson Cooper 360."

"It's extremely revealing how exactly he went about making those statements, and we're going to let everybody see parts of that," he added.

Rep. Adam Schiff, another committee member, told CNN's Don Lemon later Wednesday that the outtakes "will be significant in terms of what the President was willing to say and what he wasn't willing to say."

The California Democrat said the outtakes will show "all of those who are urging him to say something to do something to stop the violence. You'll hear the terrible lack of a response from the President, and you'll hear more about how he was ultimately prevailed upon to say something and what he was willing to say and what he wasn't."

The video tape outtakes will be one part of a larger presentation during which the committee plans to detail Trump's lack of attention to the ongoing riot. The committee has said it will focus on the 187 minutes that Trump sat back, refusing to act, as the Capitol was under siege. Some committee members have described this as Trump's "dereliction of duty."

Read more here.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has needed to edit down overwhelming evidence in order to fit within the time constraints of a prime-time hearing on Thursday. As evidence came pouring in, members and staff began constructing their plan for their biggest hearing yet. 

They had so much content that their initial hearing plan would’ve been four hours long. Given the constraints of a prime-time television audience, they were forced to cut. 

They cut so much that the “teaser” video they put out earlier Thursday ahead of the hearing was not in fact a tease. None of the content released through Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s Twitter feed is expected to be seen tonight. The release of the clips was just a way for the committee to present evidence they didn’t have time to include in Thursday's hearing. 

The overwhelming amount of evidence, that members say is still coming in, is part of why they are considering additional hearings in the weeks ahead. 

Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who will help lead part of tonight's hearing, told CNN that Cassidy Hutchison's testimony will be corroborated by the evidence they plan to present during the eighth hearing on Thursday night.

Hutchison's previously testified how Trump didn't want to do anything to stem the violence on Jan. 6. She also testified that former White House counsel Pat Cipollone confronted former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in a bid to pressure Trump to do something to prevent deaths from occurring at the Capitol.

The committee plans to use key pieces of Cipollone's extensive testimony to detail Trump's actions, according to Kinzinger and another committee source.

As he was coming under pressure to do something, the committee will show how Trump was more concerned about trying to figure out a way to overturn the election results than he was about stopping the violence. 

The hearing will show how Trump was lobbying members of Congress to keep the floor debate going on Jan. 6 and delay the certification as long as possible, according to a source familiar with the matter.

As he was being pressured to act, Trump was making and fielding phone calls from his allies on Jan. 6. One ally, Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, told CNN Thursday he spoke to Trump multiple times that day. Gaetz declined to say what they spoke about.

During tonight's hearing, former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews are expected to give a behind the scenes look at what was going on inside the White House as the violence was unfolding at the Capitol on Jan. 6, as the select committee focuses on former President Trump's lack of action that day.

Pottinger and Matthews were both in close contact with members of the small group of staffers surrounding the President, as he watched the deadly attack unfold on television.

Pottinger has told the committee he did not see Trump that day but did go into the Oval Office at around 3 p.m. ET and spoke to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a source familiar with his closed-door testimony tells CNN. 

Trump was in the adjacent dining room. Pottinger informed Meadows that he had been told the National Guard was not yet at the Capitol, and tried to get an answer on why that had yet to happen, the source said.

Meadows, who Pottinger described as appearing visibly frustrated in that moment, responded by saying he had made several calls to a top Pentagon official in an effort to get the National Guard to Capitol Hill, according to the source familiar with Pottinger’s testimony. 

In previous testimony, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley described his discussions with Meadows as trying to ensure the military portrayed the president as being in control.

"I immediately interpreted that as politics, politics, politics. Red flag for me, personally. No action. But I remember it distinctly," Milley said in testimony played at the hearing.

Matthews was one of a number of White House aides pushing for a statement from Trump condemning the violence. While she did not speak to Trump day, a source tells CNN, she will shed light on discussions surrounding the effort to get him to issue a response. A source tells CNN, she will shed light on discussions surrounding that effort.

Pottinger and Matthews, who both resigned following the events of Jan. 6, will also be able to give insight into the inner workings of the Trump White House. Pottinger was with the administration since the beginning.

Neither witness has been fully briefed on all the video clips that will be shown today, or the full extent of the committees evidence that will be presented, a source familiar with the conversations around the testimony tells CNN.

The House select committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021, is returning to prime time for its eighth hearing that will seek to show in minute-by-minute detail how former President Donald Trump failed to act while the US Capitol was under attack.

The committee's focus at Thursday's 8 p.m. ET hearing will be on the 187 minutes that elapsed between Trump concluding his speech at the Ellipse at 1 p.m. ET, when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol, to when Trump released a video at 4:17 p.m ET — when he told the rioters to leave the Capitol.

Committee aides say that the panel will show how Trump "refused to act to defend the Capitol" while rioters were attacking it. The committee has spoken with multiple former Trump aides who were with him that day — including former White House counsel Pat Cipollone — and their video depositions are expected to be used to help tell the story of what was going on inside the White House on Jan. 6.

Cipollone, for instance, told former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that Trump needed to intervene or else "people are going to die," former Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson previously testified.

Meadows responded by telling Cipollone that Trump "doesn't want to do anything," Hutchinson said, and that Trump even agreed with the rioters chanting about hanging Vice President Mike Pence.

The House is also expected to show clips of video outtakes of Trump recording a message to his supporters on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after the riot.

Two former White House aides who quit after Jan. 6 former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews — will testify at Thursday's hearing, CNN has previously reported (the committee has not officially announced witnesses for the event).

Previous reporting from CNN and others, as well as excerpts from committee depositions that have been publicly released — have detailed how Trump was watching television outside the Oval Office as rioters breached the Capitol walls. Before Trump released his video telling the rioters to go home, he sent out several tweets that did not tell them to leave the Capitol — as well as one attacking Pence for not joining his scheme to try to overturn the 2020 election.

On Thursday, GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a member of the Jan. 6 committee who will be leading the hearing, tweeted new video clips from depositions of Trump aides describing how he watched the Capitol riot unfolding on TV in his private dining room.

The deposition clips are from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, Pence's national security adviser Keith Kellogg, Trump's executive assistant Molly Michael, and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.

Read more about what to watch for at today's hearing.