Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., arrives for the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol fifth hearing to present previously unseen material and hear witness testimony in Cannon Building, on Thursday, June 23, 2022.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
The House Jan. 6 select committee’s next public hearing will reveal new material about former President Donald Trump‘s plans and how much he knew about the Capitol riot, one of the panel’s members said Tuesday.
The committee’s ninth public hearing will touch on the “close ties between people in Trump world and some of these extremist groups,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said in a CNN interview.
But “that’s not the only thing the hearing will be about,” Lofgren said. “We’re going to be going through, really some of what we’ve already found, but augmenting with new material that we’ve discovered through our work throughout this summer.”
That involves focusing on Trump’s intentions, she said, including “what he knew, what he did, what others did.”
“I do think that it will be worth watching,” Lofgren said. “There’s some new material that, you know, I found as we got into it, pretty surprising.”
The hearing is set for 1 p.m. ET on Thursday. It was originally scheduled for late last month, but on the eve of the hearing the committee leaders opted to delay it, citing the major hurricane bearing down on Florida at the time.
Later that same week, the committee interviewed Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for about 3.5 hours. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, had reportedly pushed Trump administration officials and others to try to challenge President Joe Biden’s electoral victory in 2020.
Thomas was not videotaped during her interview with the committee, Lofgren said over the weekend in an MSNBC interview. It is unclear if Ginni Thomas’ testimony will feature in Thursday’s hearing.
Asked to be more specific about the alleged ties between “Trump world” and the extremist groups, Lofgren said, “Let’s just say that the mob was led by some extremist groups, they plotted in advance what they were going to do, and those individuals were known to people in the Trump orbit.”
The committee is investigating the facts and circumstances surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, when a violent mob of then-President Donald Trump‘s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. The insurrection forced lawmakers to flee their chambers and temporarily stopped them from confirming President Joe Biden‘s victory over Trump in the 2020 election.
The committee also faces an end-of-the-year deadline to submit a final report to the president and Congress containing its findings. That report will include recommended policy changes to make U.S. elections more secure in the future, Lofgren told CNN on Tuesday.
Before the hearing was postponed on Sept. 27, NBC News reported that the panel was expected to show clips of Roger Stone, a longtime political operative and confidant of Trump’s, talking about challenging the 2020 election results.
