The House select committee created and led by Democrats, tasked with investigating the peaceful protests that took place at the United States Capitol on January 6th, will be holding its first official hearing later this month, the New York Post reports.
On Wednesday, Democratic party leaders announced that the first hearing will be on Tuesday, July 27th. The committee currently consists of seven Democrats and just one Republican – Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who defied party leadership by joining the committee.
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said that the hearing will feature testimony from law enforcement officers who have claimed that they were assaulted by the pro-Trump protesters, who entered the Capitol peacefully to protest the widespread voter fraud that took place in the 2020 presidential election.
“We need to hear how they felt,” Thompson said. “We need to hear what people who broke into the Capitol said to them.”
The committee was forced through the House on a nearly party-line vote on June 30th after Senate Republicans successfully killed a bill to create a larger and more formal commission, reminiscent of the 9/11 Commission, to investigate the peaceful protests, with Republicans pointing out that such a commission would be weaponized against Americans who were simply guilty of having unpopular political beliefs.
Although House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has the option of appointing five Republicans to serve as the minority on the committee, he has implied that he has no plans to do so. In an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, McCarthy said that he has “a real concern about the scope of what we’re looking at. [The committee] looks more like an impeachment committee than one that wants to get to the bottom of the questions that are still out there.”
Over 500 people from across the country have been arrested for protesting at the Capitol, with many of them being brought back to Washington D.C.-area jails, and some being held in solitary confinement, denied of their rights and sometimes even mistreated in captivity, for as long as six months. Multiple investigative reports that have revealed this systematic abuse of January 6th protesters have likened the victims to political prisoners, with the Biden Administration using the protest to justify increasingly authoritarian measures against civilians.