January 6 Committee Sets Surprise Hearing For Tuesday; Broadcast Nets To Air Live

Patrick Hipes and Dominic Patten
·3 min read
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The January 6 Committee has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday, a surprise move at a time when Congress is out of session and the committee had said it was going on a break until after the recess.

The news comes as the House select panel has been examining footage from Alex Holder’s upcoming three-part Discovery+ documentary Unprecedented that had access to Donald Trump and the White House at the time of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

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No details on the substance of the hearing were revealed, but broadcasters ABC and CBS and NBC as well as Fox News, CNN and MSNBC have said they will break in to regular programming to cover the session when it begins at 1 p.m. ET. While the June 9 primetime inaugural hearing of the Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss) and vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) run committee was aired live by all the cable newsers, broadcast nets, BBC World News, C-SPAN and more, the Big 3 have taken more of patchwork approach to the mainly daytime sessions since.

The committee, which last met Thursday, only said that Tuesday’s hearing is to “present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.” A source tells Deadline, however, that the hearing is almost certain to include footage from the Holder doc, which the committee only received within the past week.

“Don’t expect this to be a smokin’ gun, but it adds a new dimension to what happened on January 6th,” the source said.

Holder gave a deposition to the January 6th Committee on Thursday over the documentary he made about Trump. The filmmaker said he had been shooting footage at Trump’s rally that morning at the Ellipse as well as when he went with his director of photography to the chaos unfolding at the Capitol.

The filmmaker told Deadline in an interview that he would testify in public if asked by the committee, which is investigating the January 6 insurrection.

Holder has said he received “unparalleled access and exclusive interviews” with Trump, his children, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Vice President Mike Pence. CNN reported that Holder’s attorney, Russell Smith, said that his client cooperated with the committee because there were “inconsistencies” in statements made for the documentary and those told to the committee.

In the three-part documentary set to premiere this summer on Discovery+, Holder testified that at one point Trump said that “he was now trying to find one judge that agreed with his position” that the election was stolen from him. “And this is the sitting president of the United States saying this in the White House. And that was actually very scary,” Holder said.

He also said that Trump never acknowledged that he lost.

“He absolutely, genuinely believes that he won and that the election was stolen from him,” he said.

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