(WASHINGTON) — After Thursday’s hearing, the House Jan. 6 select committee will delay its final hearings for several weeks, a spokesperson confirmed to ABC News Wednesday.
“The Select Committee continues to receive additional evidence relevant to our investigation into the violence of January 6th and its causes. Following tomorrow’s hearing, we will be holding additional hearings in the coming weeks. We will announce dates and times for those hearings soon,” the spokesperson said.
Initially, the committee was expected to hold its sixth and seventh hearings by the end of June. But after Tuesday’s session, members said they need more time to incorporate new information into their public presentations.
Chairman Bennie Thompson said later “at least two” are planned for next month starting the week of July 11, after the House returns from the Independence Day recess. But the panel has not ruled out adding even more hearings down the road.
He claimed the delay is due to the need to take in new information the committee has obtained, from a documentary filmmaker who turned over hours of taped videos with Trump and his inner circle spanning “almost a year,” and additional Trump White House records from the National Archives.
“There may well be a need for future hearings because of information elicited because of the hearings,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., who is regularly briefed by committee chairs, told ABC News on Wednesday.
Following Tuesday’s hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., also told reporters he expected the committee would continue its hearings beyond June because of new evidence they have been receiving.
The committee’s next hearing and last one for June, scheduled for Thursday at 3 p.m., will focus on what the committee has called Trump’s pressure campaign on the Department of Justice.
The new schedule comes after British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, who had substantial access to Trump, his family and closest aides around the Jan. 6 attack, confirmed in a statement this week he “fully complied with all of the committee’s requests” and handed over footage which includes interviews with Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence.
According to Vice Chair Liz Cheney, the final two hearings will focus on how former President Donald Trump “summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the U.S. Capitol” and “ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol,” she said in the committee’s first June hearing.
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