detail all of what went into january 6th and also shed new light on donald trump s role and the hearings. and jamie gangel in studio with me, i guess the question i have is who is the intended audience for this hearing? obviously, they could just put out a report as many committees do with their investigation but that s not what they re doing. they want to try to, as you say, build a case, convince people of something. who are they hoping hears what happens tonight. i think there are two audiences, obviously the american public but even more speckly, people who maybe have moved on after a year and a half. remind them what happened that day and tell them the story of how they got there and then as we ve been told, they re going to place donald trump in the center of that, but it s also very important to them. they want to reach trump supporters. they want to reach republicans
who have said oh, it was just tourists walking through the capitol that day. it wasn t so bad, what is what we heard which was not true. they also have a very important audience. an audience of one and i would say that is attorney general maker garland. the committee can t bring charges. if they make a criminal referral, that s fine, but it has no teeth to it. so i think what they re hoping to do today and the hearings to come is really lay out the case from what they ve learned and there s no question. my sources on the committee have said they are hoping that these hearings have an impact on the justice department. and dana bash as we launch, people walking into the committee room, saw capitol police officer harry dunn, former metropolitan police officer, now cnn contributor and
during that time, working out the final tweaks, considering what pieces of video to use and not to use, even some deliberation over which members of the trump administration they wanted to hear from, which members of the trump family they wanted to hear from in this first hearing tonight. part of what we have to keep in mind is this is just a first of a series of hearings that will take place over the month of june. yes, this is their opening argument, where they re going to begin to lay out the case they believe the former president was behind an attempt to subvert the will of the american voters and stay in the way of a peaceful transfer of power but they have a number of hearings still to go so while we ll see short clips from some of these key members of the administration, key members of the family, we could see them in much greater detail, with much greater specificity during some later hearings which will be focused on key topics of interest by this committee and i m told those
the justice department and this committee, the justice department is asking, prosecutors asked for transcripts of these interviews they have done and so far the committee has declined to provide them which is also hampering and hindering some of the work prosecutors are trying to do, anderson. all right, evan, looking at the committee room where the hearings will take place in about 40 minutes from now. back to in the studio with laura coats, how important is it for the committee, ultimately to share all those transcripts with the department of justice and why wouldn t they have done that already? well it s critical to do so, because as chris was speaking about, you think you know the story but the vantage points are now going to come out, the ones you didn t realize, that was not apparent in the instance. if you re talking about trying to curate that story, not curate it but tell a story, you have to be able to bring all the different perspective and see realize this is not a cour
law or bow down to donald trump again. carl bernstein, the watergate hearings were obviously very different, went on for a long time, there was a slow build to them. there were, a very slow build, those hearings, but what happened ultimately was the republicans joined democrats, the republicans were the key figures on the committee and in the house of representatives and the senate who had pushed nixon out of office because of the facts. we now have a hearing in which we re going to learn a lot of facts. will republicans push to punish donald trump under the law, under the constitution? what is going to happen in this hearing. there are key republicans on this committee but have essentially been expelled by the rest of the republicans. there are, but what we are about to see is a narrative of sedition by the president of the united states, starting a couple months before january 6th and leading up to january 6th. we ve never had anything like a