The House Jan. 6 committee concluded its hearing Tuesday after a nearly three-hour long presentation about the activity of extremist groups in the events surrounding the Capitol riot.

The next hearing is slated for next week and is expected to focus on former President Donald Trump’s response to the Capitol riot.

Former President Donald Trump attempted to call a witness who has been cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee after the panel’s last meeting, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said during the hearing on Tuesday.

The witness is someone who has not yet appeared before the committee for a public hearing, and the person did not respond, instead calling his or her lawyer, Cheney said. The information has also been handed over to the Department of Justice.

“Let me say this one more time: We will take any efforts to influence witness testimony very seriously,” Cheney said.

During his closing remarks, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) teased the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearing next week will be a “moment of reckoning” for the country.

“The Watergate break in was like a cub scout meeting compared to this assault on our people in our institutions. Mr. Chairman, these hearings have been significant for us and for millions of Americans in our hearing next week will be a profound moment of reckoning for America,” he said.

The hearing, initially scheduled for Thursday but then pushed to next week, is expected to focus on former President Donald Trump‘s activity while the Capitol was being stormed by rioters.

“American carnage that’s Donald Trump’s true legacy,” Raskin stressed. “His desire to overthrow the people’s election and seize the presidency interrupted the counting of electoral college votes for the first time in American history nearly toppled the constitutional order and brutalized hundreds and hundreds of people.”

Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty to charges related to entering the Capitol building, voiced concern about claims about the 2020 election put forth by former President Donald Trump and his allies without evidence.

“It makes me mad because I was hanging on every word. He was saying everything he was putting out I was following it. I mean, if I was doing it, hundreds of thousands or millions of other people are doing it, or maybe even still doing it,” he said.

Ayres shared his belief that he had been blinded by lies about the 2020 election and encouraged others to take their blinders off before it’s too late.

“I consider myself a family man and I love my country. I don’t think any one man is bigger than either one of those. I think that’s what needs to be taken. You know, people dive into the politics,” he explained. “And for me, I felt like I had like horse blinders on. I was locked in the whole time.”

“Take the blinders off. Make sure you step back and see what’s going on before it’s too late,” he added.

Those who have been charged in connection to Jan. 6 are “exceedingly lucky” that there was not “more bloodshed” during the riot, according to a former member of the right-wing Oath Keepers group.

“I do think we’ve gotten exceedingly lucky that more bloodshed did not happen because the potential has been there from the start,” said Jason Van Tatenhove, who had access to the inner circle of the Oath Keepers from 2014 to 2018. “And we got very lucky that a loss of life wasn’t tragic as what we saw on Jan. 6, the potential was so much more.”

The Capitol riot could have triggered a “new civil war,” former Oath Keepers member Jason Van Tatenhove testified.

“This could have been the spark that started a new civil war, and no one would have won there. That would have been good for no one,” he explained, calling out Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. “He was always looking for ways to legitimize what he was doing, whether by wrapping it in the trappings of it’s not a militia to community preparedness team.”

Rhodes suggested the Oath Keepers was an educational outreach/veterans support group, Tatenhove elaborated.

“We’ve got to stop with this dishonesty in the mincing of words and just call things for what they are. You know, he is a militia leader,” he added.

The events of Jan. 6 instilled concern in Tatenhove over how the next presidential election could play out.

“You know, and I do fear for this next election cycle because who knows what that might bring if, if a President is willing to try to instill and whip up civil war amongst his followers using lies and deceit and snake oil,” he said.

“And that’s a scary notion. I have three daughters [and] I have a granddaughter, and I feel for the world that they will inherit if we do not start holding these people to account,” he added.

A fervent Trump supporter who has pleaded guilty to charges of breaching the Capitol building during the Jan. 6 riot said he “may not have come” to Washington, D.C., at all if he had known the former president knew there was no evidence to back up his claims of widespread voter fraud.

Stephen Ayres said he and others he was with that day didn’t plan to march to the Capitol but ultimately decided to after former President Donald Trump urged them to go during his speech outside the White House. Ayres, one of the rioters who breached the Capitol, left after Trump tweeted later that day for protesters to go home, he said, noting he would’ve left sooner “if he would have done that earlier in the day.”

Trump had been told repeatedly by different White House aides and the Department of Justice that there was no widespread evidence of voter fraud, but the former president continued to promote those claims on Twitter in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 riot.

While rioters swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, a tweet from former President Donald Trump prompted Stephen Ayres to leave the scene, he testified.

“Basically, when President Trump put his tweet out, we literally left right after that come out,” he explained. “You know, me, if he would have done that earlier day, we wouldn’t be in this — maybe we wouldn’t be in this bad situation.”

Ayres subsequently pleaded guilty to charges related to entering the Capitol building during the Capitol riot. During his testimony, Ayres also noted that he believed Trump would march alongside the protesters to the Capitol.

The Oath Keepers are a “very dangerous organization,” former member Jason Van Tatenhove testified.

“The Oath Keepers are, are a dangerous militia that that is in large part, fed by the ego of Steward Rhodes who seems to see himself as this paramilitary leader,” he explained.

“I think we saw a glimpse of what the vision of the Oath Keepers is on January 6, It doesn’t necessarily include the rule of law,” he added. “It includes violence. It includes trying to get their way through lies your deceit, through intimidation, and through the perpetration of violence.”

Tatenhove conceded that he had gotten “swept up” in the fervor of the movement, but eventually came to realize how dangerous the group was while hearing a discussion with some members in a grocery store.

“There was a group of core members of the group of the Oath Keepers and associates and they were having a conversation at that public area where they were talking about how the Holocaust was not real,” he said. “And that was for me something I just could not abide in.”

In the moments after Ashli Babbitt, a 35-year-old Air Force veteran, was shot and killed during the Capitol riot, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale blamed her death on the rhetoric used by former President Donald Trump during his Jan. 6 speech.

“I feel guilty for helping him win,” Parscale said in a text to Katrina Pearson, a spokesperson for Trump’s campaign.

“You did what you felt right at the time and therefore it was right,” Pearson responded.

Parscale then began to shift the blame for Babbitt’s death on Trump’s speech, prompting Pearson to respond, “It wasn’t the rhetoric.”

“Katrina,” Parscale replied. “Yes it was.”

Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) swore in former Oath Keepers member Jason Van Tatenhove and Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty to charges related to entering the Capitol building.

The hearing is now shifting toward testimony from Tatenhove and Ayres, who are the star witnesses of Tuesday’s hearing.

Hours before former President Donald Trump gave his speech at the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, he had a tense call with Vice President Mike Pence.

Speechwriters for the president had stricken a line critical of the vice president that had been in an earlier draft, but they were directed to include the line following the tense call with Pence.

“And we will see whether Mike Pence enters history as a truly great and courageous leader. All he has to do is refer the illegally-submitted electoral votes back to the states that were given false and fraudulent information where they want to recertify,” the initial draft line said.

Trump wanted Pence to decertify the election, but Pence refused, insisting he did not have the legal authority to do so.

Some Republican members of Congress aired security concerns ahead of former President Donald Trump‘s planned speech on Jan. 6, 2021, noting they expected his supporters to “go nuts” when they didn’t overturn the election results.

“I’m actually very concerned about this because we have who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people coming here,” Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-AZ) said in a recorded conversation with other GOP representatives in the Capitol on Jan. 5, 2021. “We have Antifa. We also have, quite honestly, Trump supporters who actually believe that we are going to overturn the election. And when that doesn’t happen — most likely will not happen — they are going to go nuts.”

Lesko was one of 147 House Republicans to vote against certifying the election after the mob broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A Twitter employee recalled warning the social media giant that people could die if the platform did not intervene against radical posts.

“I sent a Slack message to someone that said something along the lines of when people are shooting each other tomorrow, I will try and rest in the knowledge that we tried,” he said in a clip of his deposition played by the Jan. 6 committee.

“I went to – I don’t know that I slept that night, to be honest with you. I was on pins and needles,” he continued. “I had been making, anticipating, attempting to raise the reality that if nothing – if we made no intervention into what I saw occurring, people were going to die.”

The identity of the Twitter employee was obscured by the panel.

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone said former Vice President Mike Pence should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I think the Vice President did the right thing. I think he did the courageous thing. have a great deal of respect for Vice President Pence,” Cipollone said in a clip of his deposition played by the committee. “I think I suggested to somebody that he should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his actions.”

During a clip of his closed-door deposition, Cipollone was asked about former Trump campaign aide Jason Miller‘s testimony that Cipollone said John Eastman‘s election theories were “nutty.”

Cipollone explained that he had no reason to contradict that testimony. He also explained that he did not believe Pence had the legal authority to decertify the 2020 election.

“My view was that the vice president didn’t have the legal authority to do anything except what he did,” Cipollone said.

Cipollone was then asked why he did not attend a Jan. 4, 2021 meeting in the White House. Cipollone cited privilege concerns and declined to explain why he didn’t attend the meeting.

Former President Donald Trump planned in advance to urge his supporters to march to the Capitol during his Jan. 6 speech outside the White House, according to text messages revealed during Tuesday’s hearing — reversing previous arguments that this call to action was “spontaneous.”

In a draft tweet written by Trump on Jan. 6 but never posted, the former president planned to tell supporters to “please arrive early” to his speech because “massive crowds [were] expected.

“March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!” the draft continued.

That draft tweet has been saved by the National Archives.

Additionally, in a text sent on the morning of Jan. 5, 2021, Ali Alexander, an organizer of the right-wing group Stop the Steal, sent a text message to a conservative journalist that read, “Tomorrow: Ellipse then US capitol. Trump is supposed to order us to the capitol at the end of his speech but we will see.”

“The evidence confirms that this was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather was a deliberate strategy decided upon in advance by the president,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy.

Longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, an ally of former President Donald Trump, took a creed for the “first level of initiation” to the Oath Keepers, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) announced during the hearing.

“Roger Stone’s ties to the Proud Boys go back many years. He has even taken their fraternity creed, required for the first level of initiation to the group,” Raskin said.

Raskin showed an image of Stone apparently being guarded by members of the right-wing group. He claimed that Stone had an encrypted message exchange with Florida Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs.

“Just got off the phone, he lands 5th early and leaves the 6th,” the message said.

Another message shown by the committee from an encrypted group chat sent by Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes told members to head toward the Capitol or their state Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“Anyone who won’t be in D.C. [on 1/6], needs to be at their state Capitol,” he said.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the Capitol started the second half of Tuesday’s hearing by shifting its focus to the right-wing groups behind the planned protests on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C.

The panel will seek to tie links between those groups and key White House advisers, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump ally Roger Stone.

Former Oath Keepers member Jason Van Tatenhove is also expected to testify during the hearing on Tuesday.

The House Jan. 6 committee returned from a brief recess.

The term “Red Wedding,” a massacre that took place on the fictional TV show Game of Thrones, was trending on Twitter on Tuesday after it was referenced during the Jan. 6 committee’s hearing.

The panel played a video montage of several right-wing protesters urging Trump supporters to go to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021 — including a video clip posted online on Dec. 30, 2021, from a YouTuber named Salty Cracker in which he predicted the event would be “a Red Wedding, b****.”

“You just heard one of Trump’s supporters predict a ‘Red Wedding,’ which is a pop culture reference to mass slaughter,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “The point is that Trump’s call to Washington reverberated powerfully and pervasively online.”

A Twitter employee, whose identity was obscured by the House Jan. 6 committee, testified that he felt former President Donald Trump used the platform to speak to extremists.

“It felt as if a mob was being organized, and they were gathering together their weaponry and their logic and their reasoning behind why they were prepared to fight,” he said. “My concern was that the former president was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives.”

He noted the company relished the fact that it was a favorite social media platform of the former president. He added that if it had been any other user, the company would have suspended him much sooner.

Trump’s account was suspended shortly after the riot. It has been locked out of the platform ever since.

Former President Donald Trump “boosted” several different planned protests that were scheduled for Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., including those that actively promoted violence, according to the House select committee investigating the riot.

Some protests, such as those organized by the right-wing Proud Boys group, encouraged attendees to “come with body armor, knuckles, shields, bats, pepper spray whatever it takes,” according to social media posts shared by the committee on Tuesday.

“He continued to rile up his base on Twitter and said there was overwhelming evidence that the election was the biggest scam in our nation’s history,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD). “As you can see, the president continued to boost the event, tweeting about it more than a dozen times in the lead-up to January the sixth.”

On forums and in social meeting postings members of several right-wing groups began musing about violence and extreme activity on Jan. 6, 2020, after a tweet from former President Donald Trump suggested the day would be “wild,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) claimed.

“Is the 6th D-Day? Is that why Trump wants everyone there,” one post shown by the Jan. 6 committee said.

“It ‘will be wild’ means we need volunteers for the firing squad,” another post said.

“Why don’t we just kill them? Every last democrat down to the last man, woman, and child? The average democrat is a traitor. They do not care about election fraud. The punishment for treason is death,” a post said.

“It’s time for the DAY OF THE ROPE! WHITE REVOLUTION IS THE ONLY SOLUTION!,” a post said.

The committee did not divulge where those posts came from. Jim Watkins, the owner of 8kun, which Raskin described as the birthplace of the Qanon movement, said Trump’s tweet was a key motivator in him traveling to Washington, D.C, on the day of the rally.

“When the President of the United States announced that he was going to have a rally. Then I bought a ticket and went,” he told the committee during his deposition.

Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) announced that the committee would break for a 10-minute recess.

Several right-wing groups began mobilizing and organizing protests to take place in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, after a tweet from former President Donald Trump suggested that the day would be “wild,” according to evidence shared during Tuesday’s hearing.

The tweet, posted by Trump on Dec. Dec. 19, 2020, is at the center of the committee’s hearing on Tuesday as lawmakers seek to establish a link between the former president and the violence during the Jan. 6 riot.

One such group, Women for America First, had initially planned to hold a protest on Jan. 22 and 23 — several days after President Joe Biden was set to be inaugurated. However, the group sought to reschedule their permit for Jan. 6, 2021, in the hours after Trump’s tweet, the panel said.

Several other groups and right-wing media personalities, such as Alex Jones, also began promoting events on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., according to the committee.

White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson decried that the White House was “unhinged” following a wild Dec. 18, 2020 meeting.

A gathering of Trump allies met in the White House to discuss efforts to challenge the election. Allies of Sidney Powell had blasted Trump allies skeptical of their efforts to challenge to the election of being “p***ies,” Rudy Guiliani recalled.

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone had pressed Powell for evidence to back some of her claims about the election, but she gave him the run-around in response and questioned his motives.

Former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann recalled pressing Powell on her election claims and drew a similar response from her. He noted that courts and judges had thrown out challenges to the election that she had backed. She told him the judges were “corrupt.”

He said some of those judges had been appointed by Republicans and even former President Donald Trump.

“She says, ‘Well, the judges are corrupt.’ And I was like ’Every one, every single case that you’ve done, the case that you’ve lost— every one of them — the judge was corrupt, even the ones we appointed. I’m being nice, but I was much more harsh to her,” he said.

Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP

Former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone did not think Sidney Powell, a lawyer for Donald Trump’s campaign who had promoted conspiracy theories of rigged voting machines, should be appointed as special counsel to investigate claims of a stolen election, he said in testimony to the Jan. 6 committee.

During a White House meeting on Dec. 18, 2020 — a meeting at the center of Tuesday’s hearing — the former president aired the idea of appointing Powell as a special counsel to investigate voter fraud. Several of Trump’s aides shot down the idea, arguing Powell’s claims lacked proof.

That meeting on Dec. 18 is central to the committee’s hearing on Tuesday as lawmakers are seeking to use testimony to prove his counsel and lawyers “destroyed the baseless factual claims and ridiculous legal arguments” he sought to make.

AP

Former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, began exploring “constitutional loopholes” after having doubts that fraud could tip the 2020 election, his top aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified.

“During this period he pursued his goal with all this to keep Trump in office. He very seriously deeply considered that allegations of fraud, but when he became [convinced] it wouldn’t overturn the election … [he began to] explore potential constitutional loopholes, more extensively,” she said in a clip played by the committee.

She noted Meadows was interested in ideas from lawyer John Eastman and others about legal methods of keeping Trump in office.

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

Former President Donald Trump asked his then-Attorney General Bill Barr to seize voting machines following his electoral loss in 2020, the former Justice Department head testified.

“My recollection is a president said something like, ‘Well, we could get some people say we can get to the bottom of this if, if the department seizes the machines,'” Barr recalled in a clip played by the committee. “And I said, ‘absolutely not, there’s no probable cause.'”

While that may have been the end of the matter for Barr, other allies of Trump such as Sidney Powell encouraged the seizure of machines. The committee showed a graphic of a draft executive order that read, “Effective immediately, the Secretary of Defense shall seize, collect, retain, and analyze all machines.

“The specific plan was to name Sidney Powell as special counsel to Trump lawyer post election period making outlandish claims about Venezuela and Chinese interference in the election, among others,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said.

He then played a clip of former White House counsel Pat Cipollone denouncing the idea.

After litigation over the 2020 election results had ended and states certified their results securing President Joe Biden’s victory, former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said she began to “plan for life after the administration,” according to video testimony shared during the Jan. 6 committee’s hearing on Tuesday.

This view was shared by other White House aides, such as Ivanka Trump and former Attorney General William Barr, who said they acknowledged the Trump administration would no longer be in power and conceded that Biden had won.

“I said, ‘How long are we dealing with stolen election stuff? Where’s this going to go?'” Barr said in video testimony. “And by that time, [Former White House chief of staff Mark] Meadows had caught up with me … and said, ‘I think he’s becoming more realistic and knows this.'”

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified that he believes former President Donald Trump should have conceded the 2020 election in mid-December.

“I was the White House Counsel,” he said. “Those decisions are political. So to the extent that the question is that I can see the election is, did I believe he should concede the election at that point in time. Yes, I did.”

He also noted that he found no evidence of widespread voter fraud and believed that former chief of staff Mark Meadows agreed with that assessment.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr also suggested he believed the matter was settled after the electoral college convened in December.

“In my view, that was the end of the matter,” he said about the Electoral College votes being finalized on Dec. 14, 2020.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Despite aides to the former president urging him to concede the election in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 riot, Donald Trump continued to “mobilize” right-wing groups that traveled to Washington, D.C., to disrupt Congress from certifying the election results, lawmakers said on Tuesday.

However, similar efforts to incite violence in order to demand victory aren’t necessarily new, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) argued.

“The problem of politicians whipping up mob violence to destroy fair elections is the oldest domestic enemy of constitutional democracy in America. Abraham Lincoln knew it too,” Raskin said. “As we’ll see, the creation of the internet and social media has given today’s tyrants tools of propaganda and disinformation that yesterday’s despots could only have dreamed.”

Former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, son of the late conservative star Justice Antonin Scalia encouraged former President Donald Trump to concede the election.

“I conveyed to him that I thought that it was time for him to acknowledge President Biden had prevailed in the election,” he told the committee. “Unfortunately, I believe that what had to be done was concede the outcome.”

He began telling Trump he should encourage Trump to concede in December 2020.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL), one of the lawmakers leading Tuesday’s hearing, began her opening statement with the arguments the panel hopes to prove, including that former President Donald Trump “entertained extreme measures designed to help him stay in power.”

Trump had floated ideas such as seizing voting machines in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 and coordinated with White House aides in last-ditch attempts to overturn the election, Murphy said.

The panel will also examine a tweet from Trump on Dec. 19, 2020, in which he said, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” That tweet, along with a speech from Trump on the night before the riot, “further inflamed an already angry crowd,” Murphy said.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Former President Donald Trump issued a rallying cry in a December 2020 tweet that laid the groundwork for the Capitol riot, Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) said during her opening remarks.

“The president called for backup early in the morning of December 19, the president sent out a tweet urging his followers to travel to Washington, D.C., for January,” she said. “This tweet served as a call to action and in some cases, as a call to arms for many of President Trump’s, most loyal supporters.”

“It’s clear the president intended the assembled crowd on January 6th to serve his goal and, as you’ve already seen, and as you will see again today, some of those who were coming had specific plans,” she added.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Former President Donald Trump was not an “impressionable child,” Vice Chairwoman Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) declared during her opening remarks.

While defenders of Trump have argued he had individuals in his orbit such as John Eastman and Sidney Powell peddling claims of malfeasance in the 2020 election, he also had been informed by others that the election was legitimate, Cheney stressed.

“Now the argument seems to be that President Trump was manipulated by others outside the administration that he was persuaded to ignore his closest advisers and that he was incapable of telling right from wrong,” she said.

“President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices,” she added.

A number of individuals in Trump’s orbit such as former Attorney General Bill Barr told Trump that claims of the election being rigged were false.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) began the panel’s seventh hearing on Tuesday by acknowledging it is lawful and legitimate to challenge election results in court — but that lawmakers must draw the line when it comes to violence, he said.

“When you’re on the losing side, that doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it,” Thompson said in his opening statements. “You can’t turn violent and can’t try to achieve your desired outcome to force or harassment or intimidation. The real leader who sees their supporters going down that path approaching has a responsibility to say, ‘We came up short.'”

Lawmakers are expected to make arguments during Tuesday’s hearing that link former President Donald Trump’s efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power and the violence at the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who reportedly delivered eight hours of testimony last week, is not expected to testify publicly, Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) told CNN.

Additionally, he noted that there currently are no plans to have testimony from Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas.

“Not at this point,” he told CNN’s Manu Raju.

During the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas reportedly pushed then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to challenge the 2020 election, according to texts obtained by multiple outlets in March. This has stirred public interest in her activities following the election.

Thompson also noted that he wants Steve Bannon to comply with the committee’s subpoena if he were to testify before the committee. Over the weekend, Bannon told the committee he would be interested in testifying after former President Donald Trump said he would waive claims of executive privilege.

“In order for us to consider, he has agreed to comply with the items in the subpoena,” Thompson said.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP

Members of the Oath Keepers group attempted to get in contact with then-President Donald Trump‘s team preceding the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a report.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes tried to get the group’s general counsel, Kellye SoRelle, who volunteered for Lawyers for Trump, which pushed legal challenges aiming to overturn the results of the 2020 election, to give him her contacts in and around the Trump administration, according to a report from NBC News.

SoRelle said she had contacts connected to the Trump administration, as well as former Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Rhodes was hoping to send an email to Trump’s inner circle advocating the invocation of the Insurrection Act, the lawyer said.

Click here to read the full story.

Susan Walsh/AP

Oath Keepers founder and leader Stewart Rhodes has reportedly offered to deliver public testimony to the House Jan. 6 committee.

A lawyer for Rhodes was adamant that his testimony be delivered live, unedited, and carried by major TV networks, indicating that Rhodes will respond to accusations the panel has been making about the Oath Keepers’s activities in the days surrounding the Capitol riot, CBS reported.

“He wants to confront them,” Rhodes’s attorney James Bright told Politico.

Rhodes is incarcerated and set to stand trial in a seditious conspiracy case regarding his activity surrounding the events of Jan. 6. The committee has long examined the Oath Keepers’s activities in the days that followed the 2020 election.

Click here to read the full story.

The hearing Tuesday is expected to include discussions of a December 2020 meeting at the White House with several GOP members of Congress, a source told CNN’s Manu Raju.

Reps. Mo Brooks (R-AL), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Andy Harris (R-MD), and others reportedly attended the meeting. Several members of that group have been subpoenaed by the panel and some had reportedly sought pardons from former President Donald Trump.

The committee is planning to shed additional light on how some members of Congress sought to help Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election.

(Graeme Jennings / Washington Examiner)

The Jan. 6 committee’s hearing on Tuesday is set to focus on militant groups, with the panel particularly focusing on a tweet from former President Donald Trump that lawmakers hope to argue led to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The hearing will examine the events that took place after Dec. 14, 2020, when states cast their electoral votes securing President Joe Biden’s victory, and before the Jan. 6 riot. Lawmakers will hope to shift their focus from Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results — which has been a major focus in the previous hearings — and instead examine how he attempted to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

The panel’s evidence will also home in on a tweet from Trump on Dec. 19, 2020, in which he said, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” That tweet, lawmakers will argue, laid the groundwork for far-right groups to begin planning trips to the Capitol and led to the violence that ensued that day.

Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) are expected to lead the hearing Tuesday.

The hearing is expected to center on connections between allies of former President Donald Trump and members of extremist groups, as well as how his efforts to challenge the 2020 election failed.

Raskin has done work in Congress to investigate and thwart domestic extremist groups, such as white nationalist organizations, the New York Times reported.

He has teased that the committee will disclose evidence of additional links between extremist groups, such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, and Trump, per the outlet.

Murphy has also suggested the hearing will discuss connections between Trump allies in Congress and extremist groups.

“I think all of that is pretty public,” Murphy said, according to Florida Politics. “They were quite public about their efforts to amplify the president’s call to use Jan. 6 as a last stand in this effort to remain as President.”

The hearing Tuesday is the seventh public hearing of the summer from the committee and follows the bombshell testimony last month from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

Susan Walsh/AP

Two witnesses are set to appear for live testimony before the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday, including a former member of the far-right Oath Keepers group.

The committee will hear from Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the group who served as a close aide to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes from 2014 to 2018. Tatenhove was part of the inner circle of the group for years, but he left in 2018 — two years before the 2020 election. However, he is expected to give testimony about how Rhodes promoted extreme ideology to the group during its formative years and how this may have contributed to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The panel will also hear from Stephen Ayres, a man who traveled from Ohio to the Jan. 6 riot and has since pleaded guilty to charges related to entering the Capitol building.

During the hearing Tuesday, the House Jan. 6 committee is expected to present encrypted communications between allies of former President Donald Trump and extremist groups.

The committee is also expected to play snippets of testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who reportedly delivered eight hours of testimony last week. They had long sought testimony from him.

The hearing Tuesday is expected to focus on links between Trump’s inner circle and extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys — groups whose members have been charged with crimes related to the events surrounding the Capitol riot.

The Oath Keepers is a loosely organized group largely composed of former law enforcement and military personnel, according to the Justice Department. The Proud Boys describe themselves as a “pro-Western fraternal organization for men who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.”

In June, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) teased that there had been connections between the groups and members of Trump’s inner circle, but declined to elaborate. Longtime GOP operative Roger Stone, an ally of Trump, met with members of the Oath Keepers and communicated with them through an encrypted messaging app, documentary footage showed.

“Any claim, assertion, or implication that I knew about, was involved in, or condoned the illegal acts at the Capitol on Jan. 6 is categorically false, and there is no witness or document that proves otherwise,” he told the Washington Post in response to the release of the footage.

Former President Donald Trump slammed the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol ahead of its seventh hearing on Tuesday, denouncing the panel of lawmakers as “political hacks and thugs.”

“Look at the people sitting on the Unselect Committee of Political Hacks and Thugs. Have you seen them before?” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “Yes, they are essentially the same lunatics that drove the Country ‘crazy’ with their lies and made up stories, like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, and all of the others, who were caught in the act sooo many times, and now they’re just going with this HOAX.”

Tuesday’s hearing is set to focus on links between the White House and several far-right militant groups that traveled to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a bid to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

The hearing is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m.

Former President Donald Trump never invoked executive privilege to keep Steve Bannon from testifying before the Jan. 6 committee.

After reversing course over the weekend and telling the Jan. 6 committee he was willing to testify publicly, U.S. attorneys undercut Bannon’s change of attitude. Rather than Trump waiving executive privilege, attorneys argued Bannon is trying to curry favor with the committee before his contempt trial starts next week.

“The Defendant’s timing suggests that the only thing that has really changed since he refused to comply with the subpoena in October 2021 is that he is finally about to face the consequences of his decision to default,” U.S. Attorney Amanda Vaughn wrote in a filing. “On June 15, 2022, the Court denied his motion to dismiss the indictment; he is now one week from trial.”

Click here to read the full report.

Alex Brandon/AP

A judge declined to delay Steve Bannon’s trial just one week before he is set to appear in court on contempt of Congress charges.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols issued several rulings on Monday shooting down defenses being explored by Bannon’s attorneys. The judge also rejected a bid from Bannon’s legal team to delay the trial after his lawyers expressed concerns about a biased jury due to recent media coverage of the Jan 6. committee hearings.

“While I am certainly cognizant of Mr. Bannon’s concerns regarding publicity, in my view the correct mechanism at this time for addressing that concern is through the [jury selection] process,” Nichols said, arguing it’s “unlikely” the court won’t be able to find unbiased jurors.

Click here to read the full report.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

The Jan. 6 select committee is slated to hold a public hearing on Tuesday, placing a focus on extremist groups’ role in the deadly breach of the Capitol and allegations that former President Donald Trump sought to prevent the peaceful transfer of power.

While recent reports indicated that a prime-time hearing was expected to take place on Thursday, select committee aides confirmed that Tuesday’s hearing is the event slated to take place this week, with plans for an additional hearing next week.

“To this point, there have been hearings detailing Trump’s plan to exert pressure on state officials, the Department of Justice, even his own vice president to help him reverse those results, and we saw that he was warned that his actions risked inciting violence and undermining our democratic institutions, but he continued to do that anyway,” one select committee aide told reporters on Monday.

Click here to read the full report.

Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP

A closed-door testimony before the Jan. 6 committee corroborated almost everything the panel has heard from public witnesses, a top member said on Tuesday.

After the blockbuster testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, the committee asked former White House counsel Pat Cipollone to speak with members privately. Cipollone’s marathon interview — he spent nearly eight hours with the committee last week — was taped, and pieces of his testimony are expected to be aired during Tuesday’s hearing.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) a top member of the committee who will be leading parts of Tuesday’s hearing, told NBC that Cipollone’s testimony lined up with what Hutchinson and other witnesses have said over the last month of public hearings.

Click here to read the full report.