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Dec. 19 (UPI) — The U.S. House committee investigating the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, will hold its final hearing Monday and is expected to vote on possible criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
The hearing, which will be broadcast around 1 p.m. EST, wraps up a probe led by Reps. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., that has lasted nearly 18 months. It comes ahead of a final report to be published on Wednesday.
In its previous hearing, the committee voted unanimously to subpoena former President Donald Trump to participate in “one or more days of deposition testimony.”
However, committee leaders said Trump refused to comply with the order after suing to block the subpoena, as he and his top aides have refused to cooperate with the panel and it remains unclear how the business meeting Monday will impact the former president.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who sits on the panel, said on Twitter on Sunday that “there’s evidence Donald Trump committed criminal offenses in his effort to overturn the 2020 election.”
“He tried to interfere with a joint session. Pressed officials to find votes that didn’t exist. And set a bloodthirsty mob on the Capitol,” Schiff, D-Calif., said. “If that’s not criminal, nothing is.”
Cheney has previously said that evidence showed Trump was at the center of a multi-part plan to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election.
“The vast weight of evidence presented so far has shown us that the central cause of Jan. 6 was one man: Donald Trump, who many others followed,” Cheney, one of just two Republicans on the panel and its vice chair, said in October.
“None of this would have happened without him, he was personally and substantially involved in all of it.”
Thompson, the committee’s chairman, told reporters last week that the panel will make criminal referrals to the Justice Department.
