Who will testify at the next January 6 committee hearings on Tuesday, June 21?
The fourth session of the January 6 Committee will focus on Trump’s attempts to pressure Georgia officials to “find votes” to overturn Biden’s win.
The United States House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack is scheduled to hold the fourth of five planned public hearings into the attack on the US Capitol on 21 June. The committee hearings, presided over by a nine-member, democratically led panel, are seeking to uncover the extent of Donald Trump’s involvement in the assault on the Capitol in January 2021, when a violent mob descended on the seat of American democracy after being egged on by the outgoing president, who said action had to be taken to prevent the results of the presidential election being ratified.
The committee has established that Trump and his inner circle were informed that the election was free and fair and devoid of any fraud. Yet the Republican White House incumbent insisted on going ahead with putting out false information to the public in an attempt to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s win.
Day three of the hearings focused on the pressure campaign mounted by Trump on his vice president, Mike Pence, to prevent the certification of the legitimate 2020 election results. The Trump supporters who invaded the Capitol were also bent on disrupting the joint session of Congress, where electoral votes were being counted.
Georgia officials to testify over Trump call to “find votes”
Day four of the committee’s investigation is set to focus on Trump’s earlier attempts to overturn the results of the presidential election by pressurizing state legislators and electoral officials to alter results and falsifying electoral slates. On Tuesday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his deputy Gabe Sterling will testify before the committee. Raffensperger, a Republican who has been in his current office since 2019, was one of the officials to receive a phone call from Trump after the election, during which the outgoing president asked him to “find votes” to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.
Audio of the call was leaked to The Washington Post, with Trump making repeated reference to “just needing to find 11,780 votes” – Biden’s winning margin. By this time, Saturday 2 January, 2021, every vote in Georgia had been counted three times and certified by the election board.
In statements during the first hearing on 9 June, House Republican Liz Cheney, one of two members of Trump’s party on the committee and also vice-chair, said that Trump had drawn up a “sophisticated seven-part plan” to overturn the results of the election, of which leaning on state officials and legislators featured.
“We will show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme”
“We will show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, a Democratic member of the select committee, told CNN’s State of the Union.
“We will also again show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme, and we’ll show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden,” he said.
Evidence against Trump could potentially be crucial in an ongoing criminal investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) into the alleged fake elector plot.
In an interview with CNN earlier this year, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco confirmed the department had received referrals about slates of alternative fake electors that were sent to the National Archives, and said prosecutors were reviewing them.
Bennie Thompson, chairman of the select committee, said that the 6 January, 2021, attack on the US Capitol was “the culmination of an attempted coup” that represented “Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”
The committee at large, meanwhile, has stated that Trump “lied to the American people, ignored all evidence refuting his false fraud claims, pressured state and federal officials to throw out election results favoring his challenger, encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol and even signaled support for the execution of his own vice president.”