The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot on Capitol Hill is reportedly gearing up for its final report and seeking to hire an outside writer to inject excitement into its account to engage the public more intensely.
Panel members are also planning to produce a multimedia presentation that can be shared on social media and arrange “blockbuster” TV hearings that attract public attention, according to reports from the Washington Post and CNN.
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“We do not want a bureaucrat to write this report but rather a historian or a journalist — or someone who writes and can tell a story in a compelling way so that people can actually understand what happened,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a member of the committee, told the Washington Post.
Committee members want the final report to be compelling enough to motivate the general public into reading hundreds of pages about what transpired during the buildup to the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol and disrupted the process of certifying President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
A target date for the report’s release has not yet been made public. With Republicans widely expected to regain the House in November, the committee will likely release its report before the new Congress is sworn into office.
If Republicans take control of the House in 2023, they are expected to nix the committee. The panel does have two Republican members — Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — but they have become outliers in the greater GOP caucus when it comes to investigating Jan. 6 in concert with the Democrats and heavily criticizing former President Donald Trump.
The committee has reached out to at least one journalist to help write the final report, though it is unclear who it is and whether he or she is interested, a source told CNN. Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson first mused about hiring outside talent for the final writeup last fall, and committee members consulted members of the 9/11 commission for guidance on creating the report, according to the outlet.
“We don’t want it to read like a clunky committee effort,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the committee, told CNN. “We want it to have an authorial voice that tells the story of what happened.”
Staffers are also planning to string together a multimedia presentation of dramatic clips and communications from key players in the effort to overturn the election, per the reports. Some of that footage could come from the public hearings the committee plans to begin holding in May.
The committee has held dozens of hearings in private since it began its work last summer as it worked to gather information about the Jan. 6 riot. The goal of the public hearings will be to “catch peoples’ attention and hold peoples’ attention,” despite extensive media coverage of the events of Jan. 6, according to committee member Rep. Adam Schiff.
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The Washington Examiner reached out to the Jan. 6 Committee for comment but did not receive a response. Thompson has told reporters the committee could wrap its depositions sometime in April and release an interim report on its findings in June.
The Jan. 6 committee has not made a decision about whether it will issue criminal referrals to the Justice Department, a source told CNN. The committee has spent over $2 million, accumulated over 84,000 documents, and interviewed nearly 750 witnesses, the outlet reported.
