The committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot has postponed its next public hearing that was scheduled for Wednesday morning due to ‘technical issues’.
Instead, its third hearing will take place on Thursday afternoon.
Committee member Rep Zoe Lofgren said the rescheduling was owed to ‘technical issues’ around getting testimony videos together and ‘not a big deal’.
‘It’s just technical issues,’ Lofgren told reporters on Tuesday morning. ‘You know, the staff putting together all the videos. You know doing, one, two, three, it was overwhelming. So we’re trying to give them a little room.’
Lofgren added that Thursday’s hearing will focus on Trump’s efforts to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results for Joe Biden. The topic for the third hearing was initially Trump’s attempts to use the Department of Justice to reject the election results, but that will be shifted to another day.
The committee has been making a case that Trump was responsible for the deadly insurrection in early 2021. The first two hearings have featured videotaped depositions of various individuals close to the ex-president including his administration and campaign advisers, daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
In the second hearing on Monday morning, committee members showed videos from former advisers conveying that Trump was influenced by his to make an effort to overturn the election.
‘The mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president, for example,’ said Trump’s former senior adviser Jason Miller.
‘I think, effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying, “We won it. They’re stealing it from us. Where did all the votes come from? We need to go say that we won,” and essentially that anyone who didn’t agree with that position was being weak.’
Committee members also showed testimony from former Attorney General William Barr saying he told Trump that his election fraud claims were unfounded. But there was ‘never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are’ and , Barr said.
‘I thought, “Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, with – he’s become detached from reality, if he really believes this stuff,”‘ Barr said.
In addition, the committee tried to show that the Trump campaign used false election fraud claims to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, telling donors that their money was going to a legal fight in court.
‘So not only was there that big lie,’ Lofgren said. ‘There was the big rip-off.’
The first hearing on Thursday night had lawmakers accusing Trump of to overthrow the government. The series of hearings is planned through June.
.
