Jan. 6 hearing live updates: Focus on extremists and alleged ties to Trump, allies

(WASHINGTON) — The House select committee investigating Jan. 6 will focus Tuesday on extremist groups’ alleged coordination with former President Donald Trump and his allies ahead of and during the Capitol attack.

Stephen Ayres of Warren, Ohio, who recently admitted to illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6, will testify, as well as a former spokesman for the Oath Keepers militia group, Jason Van Tatenhove, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Please check back for updates. All times Eastern:

Jul 12, 2:12 pm
Trump’s inner circle describe heated Oval Office meeting

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., introduced what he called a “heated and profane clash” in the Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18, 2020, when White House officials were angered to learn that election conspiracy theorists including Sidney Powell and Ret. Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn were meeting with Trump.

“That night, a group showed up at the White House including Sydney Powell, retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and former CEO Patrick Broome,” Raskin laid out. “They were able to speak with the president by himself for some time, until White House officials learned of the meeting.”

“What ensued was a profane clash between this group and President Trump’s White House who traded personal insults, accusations of disloyalty to the president, and even challenges to physically fight,” Raskin said of the six-hour meeting, before playing a series of clips of Trump’s inner circle describing the meeting.

Cipollone said, “The three of them were really attacking me verbally,” and that he and White House attorney Eric Herschmann were asking for what evidence they had to challenge the election, adding there didn’t seem to be much concern for facts.

Herschmann said Powell continued to say in the meeting that judges across the country were “corrupt.”

“Even the ones we appointed?” Herschmann said he fired back, saying he was “harsh” to her. “I think it got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there. What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts.”

Jul 12, 1:45 pm
Cipollone: ‘no legal authority’ to seize voting machines

Cipollone pushed back on the idea that the Trump administration could have seized voting machines, testifying there was no legal basis to do so.

“There was a real question in my mind, and a real concern, particularly after the attorney general had reached a conclusion that there wasn’t sufficient election fraud to change the outcome of the election, when other people kept suggesting that there was, the answer is, what is it? And at some point, you have to put up or shut up.”

“To have the federal government seize voting machines?” he added. “That’s a terrible idea for the country. That’s not how we do things in the United States. There’s no legal authority to do that.”

The committee said Trump got the idea to seize voting machines after a meeting with outside advisers, including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, who were chief proponents of the conspiracy theory that Trump was robbed of electoral victory by widespread voter fraud.

Former Attorney General Bill Barr testified that he told Trump that the government could not seize voting machines.

“Well, some people say we can get to the bottom of this if the department seized the machines,” Barr testified Trump told him.

“I said, ‘absolutely not, there’s no probably cause, and we’re not going to seize any machines,'” Barr said he responded.

Jul 12, 1:42 pm
Trump cabinet secretary testifies he urged him to concede in December

Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., revealed for the first time publicly that then-Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia “called President Trump in mid-December and advised him to concede.”

She went on to play a video clip of Scalia’s testimony.

“I put a call to the president. We spoke on the 14th, in which I conveyed to him that I thought that it was time for him to acknowledge that President Biden had prevailed in the election,” he said in a taped deposition.

“I communicated to the president that, when that legal process is exhausted, and when the electors have voted, that that is the point at which the outcome has to be expected,” he said, hitting on the committee’s argument that Trump was made well aware that he lost.

Jul 12, 1:36 pm
Cipollone says no evidence of widespread election fraud

The Jan. 6 committee aired the first clips from then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s highly-anticipated videotaped deposition, which took place behind closed doors on Friday.

Cipollone told committee members he agreed with assessments from then-Attorney General Bill Barr and others that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to overturn Trump’s election loss.

Cipollone also testified that he believed Trump should have conceded the election, and that Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows assured him that Trump would eventually make a graceful exit.

“I would say that is a statement and a sentiment that I heard from Mark Meadows … It wasn’t a one-time statement,” Cipollone said.

Jul 12, 1:33 pm
‘Three rings’ of interwoven attack converged on Jan. 6: Raskin

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., leading the hearing along with Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., laid out what he called “three rings” he said Trump mobilized in an attempt to overturn the election.

In the inside ring, he said, was Trump’s pressure on Vice President Mike Pence, while in the middle ring were organized extremists, and in the outer ring was the angry mob.

“On the inside ring, Trump continues trying to work to overturn the election by getting Mike Pence to abandon his oath of office, as vice president and assert the unilateral power to reject electoral votes,” Raskin said. “Meanwhile, in the middle ring, members of domestic violence groups created an alliance, both online and in-person, to coordinate a massive effort, to storm invade and occupy the Capitol.”

“Finally, in the outer rim, on January 6th, they assembled a large and angry crowd,” he said. “All of these efforts, we converge and explode on January the 6th.”

Jul 12, 12:45 pm
Police officers brace for ‘triggering’ hearing with rioter testifying

Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn, who testified at the first select committee hearing last fall on how he feared for his life and faced racist attacks while defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, told ABC News Congressional Correspondent Rachel Scott ahead of the hearing today that he’s expecting the afternoon to be “triggering” — and that he is “emotionally, preparing for the worst.”

With Jan. 6 defendant Stephen Ayres set to testify, Dunn said Ayres “owes everyone in the congressional community who was affected by the day an apology.” Adding, “if he stops short of being honest about the violence — that doesn’t do enough for me. If he stops short of apologizing — that doesn’t do enough for me.”

Metropolitan Police Department officer Daniel Hodges, who also defended the Capitol and has also been a regular fixture at the public hearings, said it will be notable for Americans to hear what happened straight from someone who breached the building, given that some continue to downplay the violence.

“Having one of the people involved in the attack on Capitol — in their own words describe their mentality, their intentions and the intentions of the group — you can’t get any closer to the source than that.”

Jul 12, 12:17 pm
Cipollone deposition clips to be heavy focus

Video clips from the roughly eight-hour deposition committee investigators conducted with former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone last Friday are expected to be played at the afternoon hearing, a source familiar with the matter tells ABC News.

Committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said last week after Cipollone was subpoenaed by the committee that his testimony did not contradict those of previous witnesses when he met with investigators.

Asked if Americans could assume that Cipollone confirmed the testimony offered by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, Lofgren told CNN, “Not contradicting is not the same as confirming.”

While Hutchinson publicly testified last month that Cipollone stressed to her that Trump should not be taken to the Capitol after his rally, warning, “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable” if he went, according to Hutchinson, it was not clear if the committee asked Cipollone in his deposition about the comment.

-ABC News’ John Santucci and Katherine Faulders

Jul 12, 12:13 pm
Committee to detail chaotic December 2020 Oval Office meeting

Today’s hearing will partly focus on a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020. Sources confirmed the meeting to ABC News at the time.

The meeting was said to be so long that it ended up moving from the Oval Office to the White House residence quarters upstairs. In attendance were Trump allies Sidney Powell; former CEO Patrick Byrne; former national security adviser Michael Flynn; then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone; then-chief of staff Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani, who joined by phone.

Powell, Flynn and Byrne argued with White House officials over invoking rarely used presidential powers to declare a national emergency to seize voting machines – a plan that was ultimately rejected. Trump in the meeting also discussed naming Powell a special counsel overseeing an investigation of voter fraud, as first reported by the New York Times at the time.

ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl described the meeting in his book “Betrayal” as one “so bizarre, long, and out of control that it may go down in history as the strangest meeting Donald Trump, or any other president, ever had at the White House.”

– ABC News’ Katherine Faulders and Will Steakin

Jul 12, 11:17 am
Reps. Murphy, Raskin to lead questioning

Reps. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., and Jamie Raskin, D-Md., will lead Tuesday’s questioning, according to committee aides.

One focus of the hearing, aides said, will be the impact of a Twitter post sent by Trump in December 2020, which read: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

“Today, we’ll show how President Trump’s tweet in the early hours of December 19th activated domestic extremist groups, and how some Members of Congress amplified that message, all leading to the attack on January 6th,” Murphy said on Twitter.

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