The January 6 committee is holding a series of public hearings

The House select committee investigating January 6 has finished its work — and on Thursday, it released its final report to the public.

While the final report isn’t as complete as the committee may have hoped, the unparalleled resources and access the committee had means the report is as expansive a look into what actually happened on January 6, 2021, as we are likely to get.

The much-anticipated Thursday release of the report from the select committee to investigate the January 6 attack, along with a number of accompanying depositions, gave us more insight into the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the attack on the Capitol.

The report is sprawling, with over 800 pages and dozens of attached interview transcripts, which you can find here. Even though much of what was in it was revealed during the 10 televised hearings the committee held over the summer and fall, there is plenty in the report that is public for the first time.

The January 6 committee released an executive summary of its final report Monday, and it makes the case against Donald Trump.

The committee argues that the former president not only bears responsibility for the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but that his effort to overturn the presidential election was incredibly extensive, corrupt, and illegal.

The House January 6 committee voted on Monday to recommend that the Justice Department pursue criminal charges against former President Donald Trump over his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The issuance of criminal referrals to the Justice Department for criminal conduct committed by Trump, as well as his allies and associates, was the main event of the hearing, which also included a digest of the committee’s findings from its investigation. It represents a symbolic passing of the baton to the Justice Department to do what it will with its information and its recommendations.

Former White House adviser Stephen Bannon was sentenced Friday to four months in prison and ordered to pay a $6,500 fine on two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena from the House January 6 committee. The first count was for his refusal to appear for a deposition and the second was for refusal to turn over documents. A jury reached the decision after less than three hours of deliberation in July.

Bannon’s conviction was the first connected to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot for anyone in former President Donald Trump’s inner circle, although another former Trump White House aide, Peter Navarro, faces a trial in November for contempt of Congress. It also marks the first conviction directly connected to the work of the January 6 committee.

The final televised hearing of the January 6th Select Committee didn’t have the grand finale that would have fulfilled the fantasies of the #Resistance members who tuned in to watch the proceedings gavel to gavel. This was never going to end with Liz Cheney leading Donald Trump out of Mar-a-Lago in handcuffs. Instead, it ended with a vote to subpoena Trump that may end up being more symbolically than legally important.

The hearing itself didn’t add a ton to the public’s knowledge of the attack on the Capitol. There were some new nuggets of information: Secret Service communication that gave further corroboration that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol that day, and footage of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other congressional leaders, taken by Pelosi’s daughter, scrambling to respond in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

The January 6 committee wrapped up what could be its final public hearing with a vote to subpoena Donald Trump himself for testimony Thursday.

But of more importance for the future was the hearing’s larger theme. The focus, vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) said, was “President Trump’s state of mind. His intent, his motivations, and how he spurred others to do his bidding.”

The United States Secret Service is a lot like indoor plumbing: It’s something you only think about when there is a problem. While the federal law enforcement agency does have a role investigating financial crimes like counterfeiting, it’s best known for its role protecting members of the executive branch, like the president and vice president and their families.

In this capacity, they are often part of the background. They’re the people in dark suits and earpieces who are always very near the president but ideally just outside the frame. When they come into focus, it’s a sign that something has gone wrong. And things have gone very wrong for the Secret Service lately, as text messages sent by agents during the January 6 attack on the Capitol appear to have been erased.

Democrats are having a rough summer. Inflation, disease, a president people don’t want to see on the ballot again.

So you can see why they’ve gotten excited about a TV show that offers a glimmer of political hope: The January 6 hearings, which have held Donald Trump to account for the 2021 Capitol riot, and at the same time made a tacit argument that Democrats can succeed at something — in this case, breaking through America’s we’re-over-it mindset.

The House January 6 committee’s primetime hearing Thursday represented the culmination of the series of eight hearings that stretched across the better part of the summer. This latest hearing filled in many of the gaps in what we know about then-President Donald Trump’s role in encouraging the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

And there will be more for the public to see. The committee’s chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), announced another round of hearings in September.

The January 6 committee concluded its first series of public hearings Thursday night with a revelatory look at what then-President Donald Trump was doing, and who was trying to influence him, during the 187 minutes between when he finished his Stop the Steal speech at the rally on January 6, 2021, and when he tweeted a video calling for the rioters at the Capitol to leave.

The committee also heard live testimony from two White House aides — former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews and former deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger — both of whom resigned on January 6. And it aired new footage of a still-defiant Trump from the day after the attack.

If you had to rank the people most responsible for the Trumpist turn in American politics, Steve Bannon would land pretty high on that list.

Bannon hasn’t been in a position of formal power since the summer of 2017, when he stepped down as Trump’s chief strategist (or was fired — it depends who you ask), but he still lurks in the shadows of President Joe Biden’s Washington. Just this week, he set off push alerts when he announced that he would be willing to testify in front of the January 6 House committee — a proceeding that he has relentlessly hammered for weeks.

Remember when then-President Donald Trump hurled a plate at a White House wall, spattering it with ketchup? You didn’t see that moment. You didn’t even know about it when it happened. But when Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, told that story before the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021, odds are pretty good you could picture it.

The ketchup wall was just one of many damning details in Hutchinson’s testimony, delivered on June 28. She also testified that Trump seemed intent on allowing heavily armed people to march on the Capitol, that he reportedly attempted to seize control of a vehicle from a Secret Service agent who wouldn’t drive him up to the Capitol, and that he was obsessed with the size of the crowd listening to his speech on that day. (With Trump, some things never change.)

Former President Donald Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified before the January 6 House committee behind closed doors on Friday.

His interview comes over a year into the committee’s investigation of the circumstances around the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol and after weeks of televised hearings. In those hearings, witnesses described Cipollone as one of the few figures who repeatedly witnessed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election without being a participant in them. Although Cipollone appeared behind closed doors with the committee in April, that was not a formal deposition.

The political world is still collecting itself following the testimony of former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson on Tuesday to the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The sheer volume of shocking details she provided, about what then-President Donald Trump knew in advance of the Capitol riot and his behavior that day, is such that it will take a while to assess its impacts.

Among the obvious questions, though, is just how bad this will be for Trump, politically, and how Republicans will react to it.

In one fell swoop, former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson transformed the story of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Hutchinson, who was a top deputy to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, revealed a series of stunning details about the events of the Capitol riot during her testimony to the January 6 committee. Hutchinson’s testimony suggests that the president knew in advance that violence was a possibility that day, and may very well have approved of it. He instructed his supporters to go to the Capitol, knowing that they were armed, and planned to join them personally once they arrived. After he was prevented from going personally, he told top aides that his vice president deserved the “hang Mike Pence” chants and that the rioters weren’t doing anything wrong.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows warned one of his top aides on January 2, 2021, that “things might get real, real bad” on January 6, that aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, said in the opening moments of her bombshell testimony before the House January 6 committee on Tuesday.

The testimony she provided over the next two hours included a litany of details about Meadows’s, Trump’s, and other White House officials’ knowledge of the danger the January 6, 2021, rally participants posed, their activities as the Capitol riot happened, and what they did in the days after it.

Donald Trump spent the final weeks before the January 6 attack on the Capitol careening recklessly between conspiracy theories and rebuffing anyone who tried to intervene.

In Thursday’s hearing of the January 6 Select Committee, Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) described Trump’s activities as “essentially a political coup.” And it almost was, but the effort the committee laid out seemed drawn out of some bizarre black comedy, with each detail more farcical than the last.

For a brief moment in early January 2021, it looked like Jeffrey Clark’s moment in the sun had arrived. He was poised to become a major player in Washington.

All he needed to do was successfully convince then-President Donald Trump to install him as acting attorney general, then demand that key swing states won by Joe Biden send a separate slate of pro-Trump electors to Congress, thus overturning Biden’s Electoral College win.

In its fourth hearing on Tuesday, the select House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack focused on former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results by meddling in states, particularly Georgia and Arizona, and by working to shore up his campaign’s last-ditch strategy to undermine the counting of electoral votes on January 6.

The hearing provided new details about the scope of the latter plot in particular, which included efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence and was knowingly based on falsehoods. Below are some takeaways from it.

Tuesday’s hearing of the House select committee probing the January 6 attack on the US Capitol ended with perhaps the single most emotional segment in the hearings to date: a mother-daughter team of former Georgia poll workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, discussing what it was like to be singled out as part of former President Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories that the election was stolen — and that poll workers like Moss and Freeman were involved in the plot.

In doing so, they highlighted a serious and ongoing threat to American democracy.

In the second January 6 hearing, House lawmakers argued Monday that former President Donald Trump not only engaged in the “big lie” — promoting the false narrative that the election was stolen from him — but also what they dubbed the “big ripoff.” Effectively, they said, Trump conned his supporters into giving him $250 million to contest the election results, while actually funneling many of those funds elsewhere, including to a nonprofit led by former chief of staff Mark Meadows and to Trump’s own hotels.

“We found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said in a closing statement for the hearing. “So not only was there the big lie, there was the big ripoff.”

Any reasonable observer already knows Trump lost the 2020 election, and that his claims of election fraud were tenuous at best. However, Monday’s January 6 committee hearing reinforced just how clear all of these facts were, or should have been, to Trump and his inner circle in the days, weeks, and months after Election Day.

The day’s testimony lacked one key witness: Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien pulled out of the hearing after his wife went into labor. Despite that, the committee, with Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) taking the lead on questions, was able to lay out a clear timeline of Trump’s decision to reject the election results and how top aides repeatedly debunked various claims of fraud.

The first hearing of the January 6 select committee was a bit unusual.

It wasn’t just the historical import, the primetime national television audience of more than 20 million, or even its content, though that was outside the norm. The committee of seven Democrats and two anti-Trump Republicans does not operate along traditional partisan lines, and their format deemphasized live witness testimony in favor of footage of the attack and clips of depositions.

The House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is ready to revisit a day that has already faded from many Americans’ minds, using a series of splashy hearings this summer — the first is Thursday in primetime — to produce a full, public reckoning over the events that culminated in the attack.

The legal and political impacts the public hearings will have are uncertain. Even with all the attention they are sure to get, few expect findings will massively shake up public opinion or shift the political winds for Democrats, who currently face dismal poll numbers for midterms elections. There is no scenario in which the work of the select committee leads to Donald Trump being frogmarched out of Mar-a-Lago, or even with top Republicans publicly denouncing him in the same way they did in the immediate aftermath of the attack.