Luria touts new evidence, witnesses ahead of highly anticipated Jan. 6 hearing

Rep. Elaine Luria on Sunday teed up this week’s Jan. 6 select committee hearing, touting new witnesses who are expected to further illustrate former President Donald Trump’s role in last year’s deadly insurrection at the Capitol.

“There’s other witnesses we have spoken to who have yet to appear in our previous hearings who will add a lot of value and information to the events of that critical time on Jan. 6,” Luria (D-Va.) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

Luria, a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, said the panel on Thursday — at its eighth and final scheduled public hearing — will incorporate Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s testimony, among others whom she did not name. Trump deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews is also expected to testify on Thursday.

Luria said on Sunday that there would be people included in the hearing whose testimony has not been featured thus far.

“I will tell you that people who were in the White House, people who were close to the president, and also people who had insight into the actions that were going on in the variety of ways that they were trying to control the violence and stop what was happening at the Capitol,” Luria said.

The committee will use the new witnesses to connect the dots of Trump’s whereabouts and actions on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of the then-president’s supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 election. The panel in its public hearings has heavily relied on witness testimony and visual evidence — including photos, videos and social media posts — to illustrate Trump’s role in instigating the riot.

Luria said the panel at Thursday’s hearing would go through “minute by minute” the timeframe of what Trump was doing during the insurrection.

“He didn’t act. He had a duty to act. So, we will address that in a lot of detail,” she said. “And from that, we will build on the information that we provided in the earlier hearings.”

The Virginia Democrat also said the committee would “get to the bottom of” whether the Secret Service deleted text messages from Jan. 6 amid reports that the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general discovered missing texts. The committee on Friday subpoenaed the Secret Service following the revelation.

“An agency that was such a key part of a critical event in our history, one would assume they had done everything possible to preserve those records, to analyze them to determine what kind of things went right or went wrong that day in their practices and procedures,” Luria said. “And we are looking into this. That’s why we’re subpoenaing them.”

Though Thursday’s event is the last scheduled hearing, Luria said that the investigation was ramping up and that this was not the last the public would hear from the committee. She said the panel is receiving new information every day that it will relay to the public, whether in the form of hearings or “other methods to present the evidence.”

“We have a responsibility to present the things that we have uncovered,” she said. “And we are talking about how the best way to do that is moving forward after this hearing.”