January 6 panel releases witness transcripts with full report on the way – live

The full report from the January 6 House panel investigating Donald Trump’s insurrection has not yet materialized, but the committee has just published transcripts of the testimony of a key witness.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, gave some of the most dramatic, and damning testimony during a live public hearing in the summer.

She said Trump attempted to strangle his secret service agent and lunged for the steering wheel when he was told that he would not be driven to join the rioters he incited during the January 6 Capitol riot.

She gave further, closed doors testimony to the panel in September, released by the committee in two documents this morning. One from 14 September is here; and the other from the following day is here.

The first session lasted five and a half hours, and the second was two and half. There’s more than 200 pages of transcript here, but one episode sticks out, aboard Air Force One early on 5 January 2021, as Trump was flying back to Washington after “stop the steal” rallies in Georgia.

It would appear to allude to the plot to try to persuade vice-president Mike Pence to deny certification of Trump’s election defeat by Biden in Congress the following day, the infamous Capitol riot incited by Trump.

In a conference room meeting attended by, among others, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene, allies were talking up the scheme, and assuring Trump it would succeed, Hutchinson says.

But she says she then saw Meadows take Trump aside after the meeting and caution him thus: “In case we didn’t win this [the election] sir, and in case, like, tomorrow doesn’t go as planned, we’re gonna have to have a plan in place.”

According to Hutchinson, Trump replied: “There’s always that chance we didn’t win, but tomorrow’s gonna go well,” a potentially crucial admission that Trump already knew his defeat was not fraudulent.

CNN is reporting that Senate negotiators for the Democrats and Republicans have struck a deal to secure passage of the $1.7tn government spending package.

A number of amendments are incorporated into the bill, reflecting a “furious push by Senate leaders to get this done,” the network reports.

We’ll have more details soon.

Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chaired the January 6 House panel, says its investigation into Donald Trump’s insurrection uncovered witnesses that not even the justice department could find.

In a revealing interview with MSNBC on Wednesday night, Thompson also said the bipartisan, nine-member committee took its time before referring the former president for criminal charges on Monday because it “wanted to get things right”.

Thompson, and Liz Cheney, the Republican vice-chair from Wyoming, will present their 800-page full report to Congress sometime today. The panel has already sent evidence to the justice department to assist its own parallel criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

Thompson told MSNBC:

I am more comfortable with the fact that the special counsel has been actively engaged in pursuing any and all the information available. They have been in contact with our committee, asking us to provide various transcripts.

There were people that we deposed that justice had not deposed. There were electors in various states that justice couldn’t find. We found them. We deposed them.

So we had a lot of information, but now we make all that information available to them. And if they come back and want to interview staff or any members, ask any additional information, you know, we’ll be more than happy to do it.

Thompson also spoke emotionally about the demands of conducting an intensive, 18-month inquiry, and the reason it was necessary:

It’s been difficult. I have spent many nights away from home. I’ve spent a lot of time just trying to figure out why, in the greatest democracy in the world, would people want to all of a sudden stow on the Capitol because they lost an election?

You know, normally in a democracy, you settle your differences at the ballot box. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but under no circumstances do you tear the city hall up, or the courthouse up, and, God forbid, the United States Capitol.

It was just something that for most Americans, it was beyond imagination. And so, it played out in real time. People could see it. And there are still a lot of people who can’t fathom why our people would do that.

You can view Thompson’s MSNBC interview here.

It’s a third day of reckoning this week for Donald Trump as the January 6 House committee releases the final report from its 18-month investigation into the former president’s insurrection.

Delayed from Wednesday, today’s publication of a dossier expected to run to 800 pages will expose in depth the extraordinary, and illegal efforts Trump employed to stay in power after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden.

We already know from previous hearings much of the plotting and scheming that took place. Trump incited a mob that overran the US Capitol on January 6 2021, seeking to halt the certification of Biden’s victory; tried to manipulate states’ election results in his favor; and attempted to install slates of “fake electors” to reverse his defeat in Congress.

On Wednesday night, the House panel released transcripts of 34 witness interviews.

Subjects of the interview transcripts included Jeffrey Clark, a senior official in the Trump justice department; John Eastman, a conservative lawyer and an architect of Trump’s last-ditch efforts to stay in office; and former national security adviser Mike Flynn, who was convicted of lying to the FBI but pardoned by Trump.

Each invoked his fifth-amendment right against self-incrimination.

More transcripts are expected to be released today.

Panel member Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, told CBS: “I guarantee there’ll be some very interesting new information in the report, and even more so in the transcripts.”

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