LIVE: Follow along with the Jan. 6 committee hearings

We are roughly a half-hour away from tonight’s hearing.

I will post updates here and on Twitter tonight. Don’t forget to follow Daily Kos!

The hearing will get underway tonight at 8:02:30 PM ET, if you take CSPAN’s word for it—and since they are the only cameras in the room tonight, we will. Live updates to post soon.

USCP Officer Harry Dunn is in the chamber tonight: 

The members of the committee have entered the chamber and are taking their seats.

Chairman Bennie Thompson begins tonights hearing by thanking everyone for their attention. 

“I’m Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Jan. 6 Committee, I was born raised and still lived in Bolton, Mississippi,” he says, explaining his background, a part of the country where people justify the actions of slavery, the KKK and lynching. 

“I'm reminded of that dark history as I hear voices today try to justify the actions of the insurrectionists on Jan. 6, 2021,” Thompson says.

In his opening remarks this evening, Chairman Thompson outlines how in 1862, after citizens took up arms against the country, Congress adopted a new oath that no person who supported a rebellion could hold an office of public trust. Members swear an oath to protect the Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic. 

He praises the officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6. 

They did this to defend “your vote,” Thompson said, to protect the peaceful transfer of power. 

Chairman Thompson says the truth must be confronted with resolve and determination and delivers a barn-burner of a speech. He has made it plain what the committee believes it has uncovered: overwhelming evidence that the 45th president attempted to overthrow the election. We move now to remarks from Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee. She is just one of two Republicans, including Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger.

In her opening remarks, vicechair Liz Cheney says that the public will hear extensive evidence tonight and in the coming weeks about the overarching conspiracy by Trump to overturn the 2020 election 

Recorded deposition from Attorney General Bill Barr: 

In a recorded deposition of Ivanka Trump before the Jan. 6 Cmte where she faced questions about AG’s Barr's conclusion of no widespread fraud, she says Barr's determination "affected her perspective.

"I accepted what he was saying," Ivanka Trump said.

Cheney: Trump ignored the rulings of our nation's courts, his campaign leadership, his White House staff, state officials, the DOJ, and DHS. He invested millions of campaign funds purposefully spreading false information, running ads he knew were false.

Trump tried "convincing millions the election was corrupt and he was the true president. This misinformation campaign provoked the violence on January 6," Cheney says.

You can watch Chairman Thompson’s opening remarks here in full: 

And here’s a link to vicechair Liz Cheney’s breaking down the core of the matter before us: 

The hearings to come will be broken up in segments with a specific focus for each. One hearing will focus on the pressure campaign at the DOJ, another hearing will focus on the pressure campaign aimed at Pence. The final hearings will zero in on the violence that day, the live reactions from those inside the Capitol, trapped, those outside and those who were inside the White House, watching as Trump sat idly by.

We are now seeing a video that has never been shown before in its entirety including footage of the mob breaching barriers and rushing the Capitol.

Trump Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley summed up multiple conversations then-Vice President Mike Pence had on Jan. 6th during testimony before the House Committee: “He was very animated and he was very explicit. Very direct, unambiguous orders. There was no question about that… to Secretary Miller: ‘Get the military down here. Get the Guard down here. Put down this situation.” Milley’s conversation with Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows was markedly different in tone, with Meadows imploring Milley to “kill the narrative that the Vice President is making all the decisions.” “We need to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge,” Milley said Meadows told him, calling the remarks a “red flag.” 

Ten minutes of graphic video footage was played in the chambers tonight . It featured aerial footage of the mob as well as body cameras worn by officers who worked to repel them for hours. We saw the attack from new angles. You can hear the intensity, the goading by the president’s supporters. The taunts and jeers and the requests to find Pence and Speaker Pelosi in order to hang them.

The radio transmission offers a clear-cut view into the terror officers experienced as they realized how horribly overwhelmed they were. 

In other moments of the video shown tonight,  the committee establishes a key moment in the timeline. They show a clip of Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, now facing seditious conspiracy charges, where he breaks into the Capitol by busting through a window and allowing others to pour in behind him. This happened around 2:15 p.m. on January 6.

Proud Boy Joe Biggs also enters around this time.

And then within ten minutes, Trump sends the tweet saying that Pence didn’t have the courage to stop the count. 

Pence announced more than an hour before he did not have the authority to stop the count or change the outcome. 

The committee is now on a 10-minute recess just around 9:05 p.m. and when we get back, there will be live witness testimony.

Part one of the video shown tonight: 

Here’s the second part of the clip shown during tonight’s hearing featuring never-before-seen footage: