When the Jan. 6 committee wrapped its most recent hearing on Thursday, it was to have been the last time the panel gathered for the month. That changed on Monday afternoon, when the committee announced that — surprise! — there would be a hearing this week after all.
As of Monday evening, there was an air of mystery around the snap hearing. The committee’s members and staffers were tight-lipped about who would be appearing. Its statement announcing the hearing only promised to “present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.”
The House Jan. 6 committee is holding its sixth public hearing on Tuesday, June 28 at 1 p.m. ET. Get expert analysis in real-time on our liveblog at msnbc.com/jan6hearings.
“There is new evidence that is coming to [the committee’s] attention on an almost daily basis," a source familiar with the hearing told NBC News. The planned final two hearings weren’t supposed to take place until July, the source added. "You can deduce from that that there will be a lot of significance to the hearing.”
Well, then! That’s a pretty bold claim to make in what definitely feels like a high-risk/high-reward situation for the committee. On one hand, the committee’s planned pause had threatened to sap some of the momentum gained in the weeks of hearings so far. Over the course of its five roughly two-hour segments, the committee has been putting on a prestige television show — one that plays with a nonlinear timeline. If the chaos of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was the opening sequence of the show’s pilot, each subsequent episode has focused on unfolding the layers that contributed to the attack.
It’s made for a rich drama so far. But unfortunately it doesn't take long for the news cycle to move on, even before the committee has been able to present its metaphorical season finale. There’s also the risk of losing control of the tightly crafted narrative that the panel has labored to produce. The cascade of news about the investigation’s details over the preceding months had already threatened to make the hearings themselves seem redundant.
That thankfully hasn’t been the case, and Tuesday’s surprise hearing offers a potential jolt of intensity to draw even more attention to the committee’s work. On the other hand, though, the secrecy surrounding the unanticipated hearing threatened to allow the public’s imagination to fill in the gaps. Among the names tossed around as potential witnesses were those of former White House counsel Pat Cippolone, whom the committee has been calling on to testify under oath, and Alex Holder, who recently turned over to the committee footage from a documentary he was filming during and after the attack.
Punchbowl News reported on Monday evening that the new testimony actually would come from Cassidy Hutchinson, who served as a senior aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson was seen during a previous hearing testifying that Republican members of Congress had sought pardons for their efforts to reverse Joe Biden's win in 2020. Hers wasn't a name that many people were predicting, so to meet the expectations of viewers hoping to see Ginni Thomas testify about her behind-the-scenes work, for example, but instead wind up watching a formerly unknown aide, the revelations she has would hopefully be pretty major.
I do have faith so far that the committee isn’t overplaying its hand. This isn’t the first time it has shifted its schedule since it began its public hearings this month; last week’s hearing was originally scheduled to take place on June 15, but the committee’s aides needed more time to properly construct their presentation, necessitating a somewhat abrupt delay. It seems the pause was worth the wait, as the committee crisply laid out former President Donald Trump’s attempted weaponization of the Justice Department to flip the results of the 2020 election.
I can honestly say that even if I weren’t going to be liveblogging the entire event, I’d definitely be tuning in to find out just what the panel has in store for us on Tuesday. We already know so much about Trump’s role in laying the groundwork for Jan. 6 that the promise of something new and noteworthy is too intriguing to pass up — and I'm sure the committee hopes that I'm not alone there.
