When the Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney has given way to the “never seen” videos of the attack on the Capitol, the members of the House of Representatives present in the room in which the conclusions of the commission investigating the events of January 6 were presented they have begun to stir in their chairs. They were there that day when they had to certify the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden and they had to hide to save their lives.
This Thursday, reliving those hours with new images, they shook their heads, put their hands to their faces, looked away from the disturbing images compiled during an investigation that has lasted 11 months and has included conducting a thousand interviews and review of some 140,000 documents. Democrat Pramila Jayapal couldn’t hold back her tears, while her party colleague Cori Bush left her a handkerchief to dry her tears. Later, during the break that followed the screening, Bush, visibly affected, told EL PAÍS: “These people belong to our communities and they came here to attack what this building represents. I still do not believe it”.
The hearing had started half an hour earlier, with committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, getting right to the point. “January 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup by Donald Trump,” he stated at the beginning of a historic session, broadcast in prime time by several television networks at the same time, and with a staging that It was reminiscent of other dramatic occasions in the recent history of the United States, such as Watergate or the events of the Iran Contra. “We cannot sweep what happened under the rug. The people deserve answers,” he added.
Thompson presented himself as an American citizen with “a constitutional oath,” demanding the protection of the United States from both external and internal threats. “That oath was put to the test that day,” added Thompson, who recalled the members of the security forces who worked that day. Some were present in the room.
Then it was the turn of Cheney, one of the two Republican congressmen who are part of the commission (completed by seven Democrats). Cheney, who is banned within her own party for openly opposing Trump and his Big Lie of stealing the 2020 elections, which she has defended ever since without evidence, sent a message to her co-religionists: “There will come a day when Donald Trump It will be history, but your dishonor will be registered forever”.
The congresswoman has later reviewed with the help of videos of testimonies collected during the investigation, including those of Ivanka, daughter of Donald Trump, and her son-in-law Jared Kushner, and documents included in it, how Trump and his family continued in the months prior to the insurrection with the hoax of electoral theft, despite the fact that they knew for sure that it was that, a hoax.
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Cheney’s objective is to test the former president’s attempts to annul the 2020 elections in the two months that passed between the victory of his opponent and January 6, a day that was called to be resolved as a mere democratic process of transfer of powers. presidential elections and which turned into a full-fledged insurrection, when thousands of Trump supporters, who had come to Washington for a rally called by him, marched on the US parliamentary headquarters and entered it by force. That day four people died, and in the following, another five more.
The audience —which will be followed by five more; the next, next Monday― has continued with the testimony in the room of Caroline Edwards, a Capitol police officer who, like hundreds of her colleagues, was seriously injured, at the push of pro-Trump rioters and members of groups from the extreme right, who had met that day in the Federal Capital. Members of two of them, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, have been charged with seditious rebellion.
The British filmmaker Nick Quested has been another of the fundamental pieces of the puzzle of the first night of hearings. Quested followed the Proud Boys in the months leading up to January 6. And he witnessed a January 5 meeting between Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes in a Washington parking lot, despite Tarrio’s court order to stay out of the Washington District. Columbia as a result of a prior arrest. According to a government court filing, the Quested documentary film crew was with the group inside the garage and picked up audio of an unidentified person talking about the Capitol. Details of the meeting have so far been scant.
Half an hour before the start of the hearing, a crowd had already gathered in a park near the Capitol, where the political spectacle was broadcast on a giant screen. Attendees were moved by a civic duty to understand what exactly happened on that day in January when American democracy was in peril and also suffered one of its greatest embarrassments before a planetary audience that saw an unflattering fragility. Also helping the outdoor gathering was the fact that there were free ice creams for attendees, at sunset on a sultry and windy day in the US capital.
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