Jan. 6 panel delays hearing as Hurricane Ian aims at Florida
WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol announced Tuesday that it had postponed a hearing scheduled for Wednesday as a hurricane hurtled toward the Florida coast.
The committee had planned to hold what was likely to be its final investigative hearing Wednesday afternoon, but members decided at the last minute to delay it as it became clear that Hurricane Ian was churning on a collision course toward Florida, where it was expected to strengthen into a catastrophic Category 4 storm.
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“We’re praying for the safety of all those in the storm’s path,” committee chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and vice chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said in a statement Tuesday afternoon. “The Select Committee’s investigation goes forward and we will soon announce a date for the postponed proceedings.”
The committee had not yet provided a specific agenda for the Wednesday hearing, but Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said over the weekend it would “tell the story about a key element of Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the election.”
This week’s hearing was intended to close the series of public hearings the nine-member panel embarked on in early June. Throughout eight hearings, the committee — comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans — sought to show the American public in great detail how former President Trump ignored many of his closest advisers and amplified his false claims of election fraud after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
Some of the more than 1,000 witnesses interviewed by the panel — a number of them Trump’s closest allies — recounted in videotaped testimony how the former president declined to act when hundreds of his supporters violently attacked the Capitol as Congress certified Biden’s victory on Jan. 6, 2021. But the committee has said its work isn’t done.
