Latest in The January 6 Project
Earlier this month, the Fulton County special grand jury investigating potential criminal interference into Georgia's 2020 elections subpoenaed members of former President Donald Trump's inner circle, including Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Senator Lindsay Graham, among others.
The Jan. 6 committee held its seventh in a series of prominent hearings unveiling the findings of its investigation to the public. Lawfare Editor in Chief Benjamin Wittes moderated a conversation with Lawfare Executive Editor Natalie Orpett and Senior Editors Scott Anderson, Quinta Jurecic, and Roger Parloff on Twitter Spaces about the hearing.
The committee will reportedly hear testimony from Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the Oath Keepers, and Stephan Ayres, an Ohio man who participated in the attack.
The big reveal from Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony and the Jan. 6 hearings that nobody’s talking about.
Algorithms! We hear a lot about them. They drive social media platforms and, according to popular understanding, are responsible for a great deal of what’s wrong about the internet today—and maybe the downfall of democracy itself. But … what exactly are algorithms? And, given they’re not going away, what should they be designed to do?
Hutchinson’s testimony suggests that the crowd on Jan. 6 was armed even more extensively than previously thought.
The concept has proved strikingly difficult for journalists and former Justice Department officials to communicate to the public. Will the committee be any more successful?
Many individual police officers acted heroically on January 6th. But the successful attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, seeking to disrupt the certification of the electoral votes, remains one of the biggest policing failures in American history. Not only did the Capitol police fail to prepare for the attack, but many members of the mob were themselves police officers from around the country.
Hutchinson’s testimony on former President Trump’s comments during Jan. 6 serve as additional proof of intent and context, and—crucially—a material act to increase the likelihood of violence.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is midway through a blockbuster series of hearings exploring Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. Central to those efforts, of course, was the Big Lie—the false notion that Trump was cheated out of victory in 2020.