The chair of the congressional Jan. 6 committee said Thursday the committee will hold primetime hearings in June. Here’s what we know so far:
The hearings will run throughout June.
The hearings are set to start June 9 and run through the end of that month.
Some sessions will be aired during prime time, and others during the day, Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told reporters.
Committee members want to lay out the narrative of the attack.
Thompson said that the hearings “will tell the story about what happened.”
“We looked at, essentially, the comprehensive story that we have to tell, and we divided it up into chapters that will allow for the unfolding of the narrative, and we hope that it will make sense to people,” another committee member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), told CBS News Thursday.
“I know that it will be gripping to people as they see what happened, and as they see both the violent insurrection and the inside political coup come together on Jan. 6,” Raskin said.
The committee has been pushing back its timeline for months.
In January, Thompson said hearings could occur in March or early April. In February, Raskin pushed that window back a month.
“We are determined to get to those hearings quickly in the spring, hoping in April, certainly no later than May,” the congressman said at the time.
Then, in March, plans changed again: “In reality, more like May, just because we have an inordinate amount of depositions to get through,” Thompson told NPR, adding: “It’s a timetable, nothing is set in stone.”
Now in April, plans have changed again. Still, unlike in previous comments about the hearing schedule, Thompson has set a specific start date this time: June 9.
The committee has tons of material, but no set list of TV witnesses.
“No decisions have been made about specific witnesses yet,” Raskin told CBS News Thursday.
Still, an unnamed committee aide told the network that the panel has conducted more than 900 depositions and interviews, and that it has received nearly 104,000 documents.
The committee is reportedly planning on releasing a report and an online presentation.
The committee also plans to release a final report on its findings sometime before the November 2022 elections. Previous reporting indicated they might also release an interim report by this summer.
In addition to those reports, the committee is also planning on compiling an online multimedia presentation, The Washington Post and CNN reported last month. The outlets also reported that the committee was looking to hire a writer to compile a narrative account of the attack.
“We don’t want it to read like a clunky committee effort,” Raskin told CNN. “We want it to have an authorial voice that tells the story of what happened.”
What’s an authorial voice? Authoritative perhaps.
They need to keep it real simple, that’s for sure.
“We don’t want it to read like a clunky committee effort,” Raskin told CNN. “We want it to have an authorial voice that tells the story of what happened.”
Have Ken Burns produce it.
Authorial means they want it to tell a story, with a narrative, not be a disjointed set of testimonies that mixes everything up. It’s critical they tell it like a story, both to make it more clear to people what happened and to show all the moving parts and how they fit together, and how that marched towards 1/6.
This is critical for the midterm, the American people should have a clear picture of what happened and who is responsible. That will give us a stark choice in the election…I would hope Americans choose wisely and punish Republicans for trying to overthrow the government, but it will be good to know if that’s really what the people think.
Something like a unified voice. Rather than its feeling like a crazy quilt of voices and stories, it’ll have the feel of having been constructed by one person.
It saddens me that with the recent passing of our beloved Gilbert Gottfried we will not have him to do the voice-over for Jared Kushner.