Rep. Jamie Raskin Says Jan. 6 Committee Will Drag ‘Trump Confidants’ In Front of Cameras in Primetime, and Soon

Rep. Jamie Raskin told SiriusXM host and Salon interviewer Dean Obeidallah that the January 6 commission plans to drag former President Donald Trump’s inner circle in front of cameras for primetime hearings — and not long from now.

On Friday, the host talked with Rep. Raskin — a member of the House Select Committee Investigating the Jan. 6 Attack on the Capitol — for his Salon interview series, and asked for a preview of the upcoming hearings:

MR. OBEIDALLAH: I saw the Jan. 6 committee, you’re going to public hearings coming up at some point this year. I’m not sure if there’s any schedule that we don’t know about or a short timeframe. And is there any sense of what we might expect to see, like the type of witnesses that you might put on in these public hearings?

REP. RASKIN: Well, you know, I’d hoped it would happen in March, I think because of all the obstruction and roadblocks thrown up by the entourage right around Donald Trump. Mark Meadows was kind of doing the hokey pokey one foot in, one foot out. Steve Bannon, Roger Stone. It’s going to be later in the spring, April or May, more likely.

But you know, I think this could be the most important hearings in American history. I mean, certainly up there with the Watergate hearings, I hope that we will do them during prime time. I hope we will see them every single day so we can tell a complete story to the American people about how this took place.

It’s obviously enormously complex, but people are following it closely. And again, the vast majority of Americans reject it and the vast majority of Americans who we’ve approached as witnesses have testified. So most people, including people who participated, are cooperating and they understand that they’ve got, you know, just a legal obligation, but a civic obligation to help us figure out what happened.

And it’s only when you get right to that kind of bullseye core right around Donald Trump and his innermost confidants that people think they’re somehow above the law and can just give the finger to the US Congress. So the way you envision it would be, it wouldn’t be like, the first hearings we saw were with the Capitol Police, and that was months ago.

So this would be more lining up a bunch of nights in a row as opposed to one hearing and then coming back three weeks later and having another. Yeah, it would not be episodic. We want to tell the whole story. We will.

You know, I felt very strongly that we go to the police officers first. That was my great frustration about the Senate trial, that we weren’t able to have them come and tell the story of what had happened, and we wanted to shock the public into remembrance of what this was about. I mean, this was a violent assault on American democracy, a riot surrounding an insurrection surrounding a coup. And it was our officers who stood between us and losing it all. So there were a lot of heroes on that day, and we can’t forget who those heroes were.

Watch above via Salon.

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