A bipartisan, select committee in the U.S. House of Representatives held its first hearing this week on the January 6th attack on our country. The proceeding included speeches from committee members interwoven with new and disturbing video footage from Jan. 6, 2021, laying the groundwork for what’s to come in a series of hearings throughout the month of June.
To date, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews and collected more than 140,000 documents. The ongoing series of hearings are an important opportunity for the public to now learn what the committee has discovered and hold bad actors involved in the attack accountable.
In its opening statements, the committee presented recorded testimony that revealed new details about what led up to the attack and the extent to which partisan actors intentionally worked to sabotage our elections. Committee leaders also outlined their goals for the hearings:
- Remind the American public how shocking the January 6th attack on our country was and reveal the extent of the violence that occurred that day.
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Make the argument that the attack was not spontaneous but rather an orchestrated and coordinated effort.
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Demonstrate that the January 6th attack was not just a one-off event but a single element of a weekslong and “sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”
The committee used video footage of testimony provided to show that all evidence pointed toward the 2020 presidential election being fair, safe and secure and that efforts to say otherwise were based on false narratives.
The committee’s investigation has been a bipartisan effort and the Republican co-chair laid out evidence of a coordinated effort by partisan actors to knowingly spread false information about voter fraud, designed to undermine public trust in the 2020 election.
The hearing exposed the internal and public campaign to pressure the former vice president to refuse to count key states’ certified presidential election results in violation of the Constitution and the law.
The effort to sow distrust in the election results was far-reaching, and there were repeated efforts to persuade state election officials and state legislators to unlawfully change their election results and undermine the will of voters.
Partisan actors masterminded an initiative to create false slates of fake electors in key battleground states. A slate of electors is the people appointed to represent voters and cast the actual, final votes for president in the Electoral College.
These fake electors could then undermine the final approval of the election results in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Overall, the hearing’s opening remarks emphasized how we have a duty as Americans to accept the results of the presidential election so that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021 never happens again.
Over the next few weeks, the January 6th Committee will hold additional hearings featuring evidence and witness testimony outlining the organized attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
In addition to this critical work, Campaign Legal Center hopes the committee will continue shining a light on how the ongoing threat of election sabotage poses a danger to our freedom as voters and our freedom as a country.
Congress must use the findings of these hearings to take action to guarantee that voters, not partisan politicians, decide the outcome of our elections.