WASHINGTON — The next Jan. 6 committee hearing will be July 21 during prime time, according to three sources familiar with the planning.
The hearing will be the eighth in a series that started in early June.
The committee's chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., declined to say after Tuesday's hearing whether next week's hearing would be the last of its investigation. He said it would be “the last one — at this point.”
The Jan. 6 committee held its seventh public hearing Tuesday, with a focus on ties between allies of former President Donald Trump and extremist groups involved in the attack on the Capitol last year.
At the end of Tuesday's nearly three-hour hearing, the committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said the panel will present a minute-by-minute account next week of what occurred on Jan. 6.
“You will hear that Donald Trump never picked up the phone that day to order his administration to help. This is not ambiguous. He did not call the military. His secretary of defense received no order. He did not call his attorney general. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security,” Cheney said.
Cheney also revealed that Trump tried to call a witness involved in the committee's investigation. She described the witness as someone “you have not yet seen in these hearings,” declining to identify the person or specify whether he or she would appear at a hearing.
The prime-time scheduling suggests the committee wants to reach the largest audience possible.
The committee previously planned to hold a prime-time hearing Thursday but postponed the plans this week. The only hearing the committee has held in prime time so far was on June 9, when it kicked off the public phase of its investigation into the insurrection. The hearing, which was carried live by 12 networks, drew at least 20 million viewers, according to Nielsen data.
