Jan. 6 committee prepares to unveil ‘roadmap of criminality’ in Capitol attack

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• Geoff Bennett:

  The January 6 committee is moving to primetime this coming Thursday at 8:00 p.m. Eastern. The committee plans to present unseen documents and provide new witness testimony about the Capitol insurrection. The committee has interviewed dozens of witnesses behind closed doors so far, including the former Attorney General William Barr, who sources say met with House investigators for more than two hours this past week.

  For more on what to expect from the hearings, we're joined by Hugo Lowell, congressional reporter for The Guardian who has been at the forefront of the reporting on the committee's work, it's good to have you with us.

  And the committee this past week, they put out a statement and it said that they will quote, present previously unseen material, give us a sense of what that might be.

• Hugo Lowell, The Guardian Congressional Reporter:

  Yes, that's exactly right. They want to show all of the investment materials that they have got from people like Mark Meadows, Trump's former chief of staff testimony from people connected to the militia groups, and testimony from people who actually shot the documentary footage, and accompanied the various actors through from election day all the way through to January 6.

  And so, none of this has been seen by anyone before other than the investigators on the January 6 committee. And so for the first time, they're going to present this at the first hearing on June 9th, the idea is to present a roadmap of criminality and that's how it's been described to me by a source on the committee. And then they're going to dive straight into the new material primetime on 8:00 pm.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, who is a committee member, he said, a couple of months ago now that this will blow the roof off of the House is, that's the phrase that he used. Is that the sense that you get?

• Hugo Lowell:

  It certainly sounds that way. I mean, we've only seen a snippet of what the evidence is. And we've seen it in court filings and every time they have a court filing, and whether it's transcripts on people like Cassie Hutchinson, who was an aide to Mark Meadows and worked in the office, or whether it's exhibits or emails that they're pulled from people like John Eastman, who wrote the infamous memo about having Pence throw the election, every single time we've had a new court filing. And we've seen that evidence, it is a huge deal.

  And so if that's just what they're making public, the slivers that they're making public there, the expectation is when they release all of it in one go in these hearings, it will be a really big deal.

• Geoff Bennett:

  What's the committee's goal? I mean, so many people's views about what happened on that day are pretty hardened? Is the committee trying to change people's minds? Or are they really introducing their work product so that it exists in the public record to prevent this from ever happening again?

• Hugo Lowell:

  If you ask the committee, they will say it's a legislative purpose, right? That's what they have to say. But it's abundantly clear from the direction they've been heading in, that their aim is to show potential criminality by the former president and people in his inner circle, and they want to present the facts and the underlying basis for that conclusion to the American public. And the hope is to show look, this is what our counsel believes, and you should believe this, too. And here's the reason why.

• Geoff Bennett:

  I want to ask you about the indictment of former Trump aide Peter Navarro. There had been a frustration among the committee members that the DOJ wasn't moving quickly enough to enforce their subpoenas that has now changed given the development with Navarro.

  But still the committee will hold these hearings without having the information that they have subpoena from the House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and the other Republicans that they've sought information from.

  How will that affect their ability to connect to this story to sort of stitch together this tapestry of events?

• Hugo Lowell:

  I don't think it affects it that much at all. Because the primary evidence here is photos, text messages, emails, and they already have that, not from the Republican member of Congress side, but from the recipients, or the people who are sending them a text messages. So they don't really need these members of Congress to turn over their communications.

• Geoff Bennett:

  Some members of this committee have hyped these public hearings as being a Watergate style moment. And yet, these hearings are happening in the dead of the summer, in June, only really across two weeks in June, most of these hearings will be held during the day, will they be able to break through do you think?

• Hugo Lowell:

  The idea from what I understand is that the two Primetime hearings that bookend the entire two weeks are going to be the big revelations that we haven't seen before, evidence of criminality, potential evidence of conspiracy. So that's the aim here.

  As to whether they break through, the committee starting to think that their job here is starting to be done. It's already it's already wrapping up. The real meat on this is when the DOJ. They're going to send all of their evidence to the Justice Department. And at the end of the day, what really cuts through to people was when people started getting indicted

• Geoff Bennett:

  Hugo Lowell, appreciate you sharing your brilliant reporting with us. Thanks for coming in.

• Hugo Lowell:

  Thanks.