House Jan. 6 committee eyes bringing sprawling investigation in for landing

House lawmakers investigating former President Donald Trump’s attempts to overthrow his 2020 election loss and the resulting insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, will return Thursday for their first hearing since the end of a blockbuster run this summer.

The nearly three-month span since their last hearing, on July 21, uncovered new threads:

• A renewed focus on the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Ginni Thomas, who played a more intensive role in trying to overthrow the election loss than was previously known

• News that 24 Secret Service agents involved in the response to Jan. 6 had their phones taken by the Department of Homeland Security

• A new focus on former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s role in the insurrection

• Trump’s own continuing efforts to stay in power, 18 months later

But House investigators, who stunned the country in a marathon series of hearings over the summer that showed the depth and reach of Trump's and his allies’ efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, still have numerous loose ends to their investigation — including the pressing question of whether they’ll recommend criminal charges against the participants in the insurrection, including Trump himself.

“I’ll be watching to see if they attend to their last major piece of unfinished business: establishing that the attempted coup they have documented never ended, just evolved, and is now targeting our elections and our democracy,” said Norm Eisen, co-founder of the bipartisan group Defend Democracy and a former top-level Obama administration official.

The clock is running out fast, with the broad expectation that Republicans will win back control of the House in November and shut down the investigation — an outcome that would give investigators just three more months to pull it all together.

Eisen, who also aided House Democrats in their first impeachment of Trump, said the time crunch means lawmakers should now move to completing their report and presenting their case to the public, including state and federal prosecutors.

“They need to lay out a road map of the evidence against Trump and others for prosecutors, civil litigants and regulators such as state bars,” Eisen said. “Whether they make formal referrals matters less than presenting the relevant evidence in detailed form — a 21st century version of the Watergate road map. But this time delivered by Congress instead of to it.”

Much has changed since the Jan. 6 hearings dominated headlines over the summer. Inflation and the economy have fluctuated as key issues for voters, the Supreme Court ruling that struck down federal abortion protections energized Democratic voters, and Trump has largely stopped talking about his 2020 election loss — instead focusing on the FBI search of his home at Mar-a-Lago, which turned up troves of classified and top-secret documents, including one regarding the country’s nuclear weapons assessments, according to reports.

Americans generally want to see more public hearings from the committee but also want it to wrap up its work soon, according to a Monmouth University poll released Sept. 27.

Public faith in the strength of American democracy plummeted in the midst of the summer hearings but rebounded over the past few months, from only 36% of Americans saying that democracy was “basically sound” to 50% now.

But with the House hearings off the air in August and September, Trump himself even saw a slight uptick in the number of people who say he is not at all responsible for what happened on Jan. 6, from 30% to 33%, according to the Monmouth poll.

DOJ tensions

The select committee’s work has run parallel to the Justice Department’s wide-ranging criminal probe of those responsible for the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and at times the two investigations have been at odds.

Over the course of its investigation, the House panel has referred a handful of former Trump aides to the Justice Department for criminal contempt charges for refusing to cooperate with its subpoenas. While some of the referrals have resulted in indictments and, in the case of former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, convictions on contempt of Congress charges, members of the committee have criticized the Justice Department for hesitating to take similar action against others, including former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

At the same time, the Justice Department has expressed its own frustrations with the select committee. During the last round of public hearings in June, the U.S. attorney for D.C., along with the heads of the department’s Criminal and National Security divisions, signed a letter criticizing the committee’s “failure” to hand over transcripts of its interviews with roughly 1,000 witnesses.

“The Select Committee’s failure to grant the Department access to these transcripts complicates the Department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” they wrote.

The following month, the select committee showed signs of cooperation with the Justice Department when it said it was preparing to share transcripts from 20 unspecified witness interviews with federal investigators.

While the committee has been hesitant to do anything that might undermine its own investigation, members recognize that it will ultimately be up to the Justice Department to hold accountable all those responsible for the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

“There’s this expectation that we’re going to announce charges against Trump,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., a member of the committee, told Yahoo News. “That’s not our job. This committee — we’ve proven our case, done our job. Now the torch is handed to the [Department of Justice].”

‘Connecting the dots’

When the Jan. 6 committee wrapped its series of summer hearings, it had delved deeply into the work of “connecting the dots” between Trump and his allies’ extensive efforts to throw out his 2020 election loss — through intimidation, intensive lobbying and a tweeted invitation to his supporters to descend on Washington.

And the panel has revealed numerous stunning anecdotes and items in its work.

Former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump attempted to force his Secret Service agents to drive him to the Capitol with the rioters on Jan. 6, and that when alerted to the fact that many of his supporters came bearing military-style combat gear and rifles, Trump waved off concerns with the admonishment, “They’re not here to hurt me.”

The committee is expected to share Secret Service records on Thursday showing that Trump knew about the possibility of violence on Jan. 6 but still wanted to be taken to the Capitol, which would support Hutchinson’s testimony, the Washington Post reported Wednesday.

Top aides to then-Vice President Mike Pence and Secret Service agents have testified that they feared for their lives on Jan. 6 as rioters came within 40 feet of confronting the vice president and his family. Former Trump advisers also revealed, under oath, that Pence called in the National Guard and local law enforcement to secure the Capitol while Trump remained glued to the television.

One player who had been conspicuously absent from much of the first round of hearings, longtime Trump consigliere and architect of the “Stop the Steal” movement Roger Stone, is expected to take center stage at Thursday’s hearing, based on documentary footage obtained by the committee.

Ginni Thomas, who lobbied state lawmakers across the country after November 2020 to send fake electors to Washington, sat down for an interview with the committee late last month.

And a top Republican in Wisconsin, state House Speaker Robin Vos, was recently subpoenaed by the committee regarding a July phone call in which Trump pressed him to overturn Wisconsin’s 2020 election results.