Liz Cheney At Jan. 6 Primetime Hearing: ‘Trump & His Advisers Knew He Lost The Election’

The House select committee that has been investigating last year’s January 6 Capitol attack for the past 11 months held its first public hearing on Thursday night in primetime.

After interviewing over 1,000 people and reviewing stacks of documents, the committee’s main takeaway from the hearing was that former President Donald Trump was responsible for the deadly Capitol insurrection.

The committee outlined testimonies from Trump administration officials who reported that Trump did not want to stop the Capitol riots, and even got angry at advisers who told him he needed to tell his supporters to leave.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), who serves as the committee’s vice-chair, made it clear that she believes the former president had a “seven-part plan” to overturn the election and that he was well aware of the violence “as it developed.” She also detailed a witness testimony that revealed Trump seemed to approve of protestor’s chants to “Hang Mike Pence,” his vice president who resisted going along with Trump’s alleged plan to stay in power.

Cheney is one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the Capitol attack.

On Thursday night, the committee also introduced The Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers, two far-right groups who lead the riots. Nick Quested, a documentary filmmaker who was working on a project with the Proud Boys at the time, took the stand. He said that the group had not been at the Ellipse for Trump’s “Stop the Steal Rally,” but had headed straight to the Capitol.

Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards also testified at the hearings. She was severely injured during the attack.

“I was called a lot of things on January 6, 2021, and the days thereafter,” Edwards said. “I was called Nancy Pelosi’s dog, called incompetent, called a hero and a villain. I was called a traitor to my country, my home, and my Constitution. In actuality, I was none of those things.”

“I was an American standing face to face with other Americans asking myself how many time – many, many times – how we had gotten here. I had been called names before, but never had my patriotism or duty been called into question,” the police officer added.

The next hearing is scheduled for Monday, and Cheney gave a preview of Monday’s hearing.

“You will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had, in fact, lost the election,” Cheney said. “But despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him. This was not true.”