House Republican lawmakers aligned with former President Donald Trump are planning to host counter-programming events in order to set the record “straight” ahead of the Jan. 6 hearings starting this week, according to a top GOP member.
Republican leadership in the House will address the media at 10:45 a.m., an event which will include Reps. Jim Banks (R-IN) and Jim Jordan (R-OH), both of whom were rejected by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) from sitting on the select committee investigating the Capitol riot. Republican Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA), Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Republican Conference Secretary Richard Hudson (R-NC) are also scheduled to appear.
The Capitol Hill stakeout will take place after the House Republican conference’s weekly meeting. The Jan. 6 committee’s summer hearings, set to begin Thursday, will be just one topic lawmakers discuss, a spokesperson for the House Republican Conference told the Washington Examiner. A representative for Scalise even went as far as to say the stakeout is “not a prebuttal” to the hearings.
Still, Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, is promising a wider scale campaign to pick apart the efforts of the Jan. 6 panel.
“I am working closely with President Trump, Leader Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and my colleagues to help lead House Republicans in pushing back against lame-duck Speaker Pelosi’s sham political witch-hunt,” Stefanik told Fox News. “House Republicans will be all over the airwaves setting the record straight, telling the American people the truth, sharing the facts, and asking the real questions like why Nancy Pelosi is the only person off limits from this investigation?” The congresswoman said she and other top Republicans are planning a slew of events and media appearances, according to the report.
The House select committee does have to Republicans, along with seven Democrats. Pelosi appointed Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who are both anti-Trump, to the committee.
Members of the Jan. 6 panel have signaled they intend to draw a line connecting Trump’s efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election to the Capitol riot. The violence briefly disrupted the process of lawmakers certifying President Joe Biden’s victory. Cheney, who is the vice chairwoman, even went as far as to tell CBS News there was a “well-organized” conspiracy around that day.
Trump has castigated the inquiry as a political witch hunt, and his allies are ready to argue he had instructed his supporters to march “peacefully” to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and raise questions about whether Democratic leadership did enough to prepare security for that day, according to Fox News. The committee itself will also be a target.
“This committee is illegitimate, unconstitutional, and designed to punish Pelosi’s political opponents,” Stefanik told the outlet. “It will not prevent another January 6th from happening, and it does nothing to address the numerous crises Americans are suffering from because of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s radical far-left agenda.”
The summer hearings come nearly a year after the House committee was formed to investigate the Jan. 6 riot. Jordan and Banks, barred from joining the panle, have since announced their own investigation into the Capitol riot to address “conflicting testimony from that time period,” they told Fox News in January.
The first Jan. 6 hearing on Thursday will be a primetime event, while the second hearing has been scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday. James Goldston, a former president of ABC News, is working with the committee to produce the hearings, sources told CNN.