Jan. 6 committee holds fourth hearing

The House Jan. 6 committee will show evidence at its upcoming hearing about then-President Donald Trump's involvement in a scheme to submit fake slates of electors in the 2020 presidential election, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the panel, said Sunday.

Federal prosecutors are reviewing the fake Electoral College certifications created by Trump allies that falsely declared him the winner of seven states that he lost in 2020. The fake certificates were sent to the National Archives in the weeks after the election and had no impact on the electoral outcome.

When asked by Bash specifically if the committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol had evidence Trump directed the fake electors scheme, Schiff responded, "I don't want to get ahead of our hearing."

"We'll show during the hearing what the President's role was in trying to get states to name alternate slates of electors, how that scheme depended initially on hopes that the legislators would reconvene and bless it," he said, adding, "We will show you what we know about his role in this."

The committee's upcoming hearing on Tuesday will also feature Georgia election officials and the Arizona House speaker who resisted pressure from Trump and his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results.

With regards to witnesses: Schiff also said the committee still has "several key people we have not interviewed we would like to" and could still possibly subpoena former Vice President Mike Pence as part of its investigation.

"(He's) certainly a possibility," Schiff said. "We're not excluding anyone or anything at this point."

Also Sunday, another House January 6 panelist said there needed to be "accountability" for the wrongdoing displayed in evidence and testimony before the select committee, but stopped short of calling on the Department of Justice to charge Trump.

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland told NBC's "Meet the Press" that "accountability can mean two things. One is individual criminal accountability that people pay for their particular crimes, as more than 800 people have already been prosecuted for everything from assaulting a federal officer to interfering with a federal proceeding to seditious conspiracy."

"But accountability also means collective accountability, and that's the real project," he continued. "Telling the truth to the people so we can make decisions about how to fortify democratic institutions going forward."

Meanwhile, when asked by Bash about the January 6 committee's decision not to turn over documents related to its investigation to the DOJ, Schiff defended the panel's stance, saying, "I don't think Congress has ever done that."

The Justice Department had raised concerns in court that the select committee had not shared transcripts and was jeopardizing its ability to prosecute and investigate the Jan. 6 events. Schiff said the committee will work with the DOJ and "want them to be successful in bringing people to justice, but I can't go into the private conversations."

Keep reading here.

Rusty Bowers, a Republican who is the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, is set to testify at Tuesday’s hearing held by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

Bowers will join Georgia’s election officials — Brad Raffensperger and Gabe Sterling — who will be part of a panel before the Jan. 6 committee detailing Trump’s campaign to force states to overturn their certified election results.

Bowers, who supported Trump’s reelection bid in 2020, refused to back efforts in the legislature to decertify President Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona.

A Republican bill that would have overhauled elections in Arizona — including giving the state legislature the power to reject election results — proved to be too much even for state GOP leaders back in February.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, quietly doomed House Bill 2596  with an unusual parliamentary maneuver.

The speaker assigns all new bills to a committee for consideration before they can have full House votes, a choice that often has a great effect on a measure’s chance of success. But Bowers took the unprecedented step of ordering all 12 House committees to consider the elections bill, virtually ensuring it will never reach the floor.

The bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. John Fillmore, referred to the move as a “12-committee lynching” in an interview with CNN affiliate KPHO/KTVK.

At the time Bowers and Fillmore did not respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Under the bill, Arizona legislators would meet in a special session to review the ballot tabulating process for primary and general elections and decide whether to “accept or reject election results.” If the legislature rejected the results, “any qualified elector may file an action in the Superior Court to request that a new election be held,” the bill said.

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The House Jan. 6 committee “won’t be an obstacle” to Department to Justice prosecutions, the committee spokesman said in a statement Friday.

The comment was in response to the Department of Justice's concerns raised in court that the committee had not shared transcripts and was jeopardizing the DOJ's ability to prosecute and investigate the events of Jan. 6, 2021.  

The New York Times reported on Friday that the committee could now share them as soon as early as July. Several weeks ago, prosecutors told a court they did not anticipate the committee sharing them until September.

The panel’s statement is the latest in a back and forth between the committee and the DOJ, where the DOJ is claiming that the panel is slowing its investigation by not sharing its transcripts, while the panel maintains it is not trying to stand in the way of the Justice Department's investigation. 

Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson, who chairs the committee, told reporters on Thursday that the panel was not going to stop its work to share its materials with DOJ. 

“We are not going to stop what we are doing to share the information that we’ve gotten so far with the Department of Justice,” he said. “We have to do our work.”

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his deputy Gabe Sterling will testify publicly during Tuesday's hearing held by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol.

The hearing will focus on how former President Donald Trump and his allies pressured officials in key battleground states as they sought to overturn the 2020 election, multiple sources said. 

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the committee, is expected to play a leading role in Tuesday’s hearing. 

The witness list for the hearing includes three individuals from Georgia: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his deputy Gabe Sterling and former election worker Wandrea "Shaye" Moss. 

Moss is slated to appear separately on a second panel, according to the committee's hearing notice. She was accused by Trump and others of carrying out a fake ballot scheme in Fulton County, Georgia. The committee will hear firsthand about her experiences and the threats she says she received as a result of Trump's false claims, committee aides said.

“We will show that the President was warned that these actions, including false claims of election fraud, pressuring state and local officials, risked violence,” the aide said, adding that Trump “did it anyway.”

In addition, committee aides said the panel plans to show the role Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows played in the pressure campaign led by Trump in these key states, “particularly in Georgia.” Aides said the committee also plans to present testimony from officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania about the Trump-led pressure campaign there.

Some context: Raffensperger's profile grew after the 2020 election when he resisted Trump's efforts to pressure him to "find" the votes necessary for Trump to win Georgia in an infamous January 2021 phone call.

The Georgia Republican has already spoken privately with the committee about his experience in addition to testifying before a special grand jury in a criminal probe into Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the Peach State.

CNN has reached out to the Jan. 6 committee for comment. 

A spokesperson for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. 

CNN's Zachary Cohen, Annie Grayer and Jeremy Herb contributed reporting to this post.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol wrapped up its third hearing of the month on Thursday. The panel presented evidence that outlined former President Donald Trump's role in pressuring former Vice President Mike Pence into blocking the 2020 election results.

Through live testimony from former Pence attorney Greg Jacob and retired judge J. Michael Luttig, recorded depositions and excerpts from emails and memos, the committee showed that Trump was told the plan to reverse the results of the election was not legal — but he tried it anyway.

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8 takeaways from the January 6 hearings day 3

The Republican who serves as Georgia’s top elections official is set to testify before the hearing held by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol, multiple sources familiar with the plans told CNN.

Brad Raffensperger, 66, is probably best known for refusing then-President Donald Trump’s push in a bombshell phone call to “find” votes in Trump’s favor needed to overturn the 2020 presidential results in Georgia. During the Jan. 2, 2021, call, Trump lambasted his fellow Republican for refusing to falsely say that he had won the election in Georgia and repeatedly touted baseless claims of election fraud.

Raffensperger has continued to defend his performance and remains committed to the idea that the election was conducted fairly and offered a warning to those who charged otherwise without evidence.

It was among the strongest public stands for election integrity taken by a Republican under immense pressure from Trump and his followers — and it wasn’t without consequences.

“You and your family will be killed very slowly,” read one anonymous text that Raffensperger’s wife, Tricia, told Reuters in an exclusive interview last year that she had received, an example of the kinds of threats and scrutiny his family faced. Brad Raffensperger told CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” at the time that the threats were unacceptable.

Raffensperger became a pariah of sorts within the GOP, facing calls for resignation from within his own party and censure at the Georgia GOP convention in 2021 due to “dereliction of his constitutional duty.”

“Let me start by saying that is not going to happen. The voters of Georgia hired me, and the voters will be the one to fire me,” he said at the time in response to the calls for him to step down.

“As secretary of state, I’ll continue to fight every day to ensure fair elections in Georgia, that every legal vote counts and that illegal votes don’t count,” Raffensperger continued.

Raffensperger, whose term is set to end next year, is running for reelection. He faced three opponents in the primary election in May, and CNN projected Raffensperger would win andbe the GOP nominee.

His leading opponent, Republican Rep. Jody Hice, had aligned himself with Trump’s political brand and previously said Trump would’ve won the 2020 election in Georgia if it had been “fair” — a stance that garnered an endorsement from the former President.

In a primary field in which his Republican opponents had committed themselves to fighting voter fraud — despite the fact that such fraud barely exists and President Biden’s 2020 victory in the Peach State was affirmed by three ballot counts — Raffensperger has expressed commitment to the same issue.

Raffensperger has also supported a controversial law passed in the wake of Biden’s victory to impose new voting restrictions.

The secretary of state, who touts himself as a conservative Republican, took office in 2019. He had served two terms in the Georgia General Assembly in 2015-2019.

Read more about the official here.

Justice Department officials are watching the House select committee Jan. 6 hearings for what kind of possible crimes the committee believes it has uncovered. 

Members of the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol are in wide agreement that former President Donald Trump committed a crime when he pushed a conspiracy to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. But they are split over what to do about it, sources close to the committee said.

It’s possible that at the end of the panel’s investigation, it makes criminal referrals or something less formal by turning over evidence that prosecutors could examine.  

Remember: A criminal referral is not an official responsibility of the Jan. 6 panel. And the DOJ would be under no legal obligation to act on the committee's request, though it could force Attorney General Merrick Garland and his prosecutors into a difficult public position. 

At the same time, if the committee opts not to make a referral, it would likely miss its best chance of making a forceful statement that it believes Trump committed a crime. Choosing not to make a referral would also mean abdicating one of the committee's only levers of political pressure at its disposal. 

During a hearing for the criminal case against the Proud Boys, Justice Department prosecutors said that the committee is planning to release all 1,000 witness transcripts from its investigation in early September, coinciding with the trial of five Proud Boys charged with seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the riot. 

Where the DOJ investigation stands: Seventeen months after the riot, the Justice Department has arrested over 840 individuals, charging roughly 255 with assaulting, resisting or impeding officers that day – 90 of whom are charged with using a weapon or causing serious injury to an officer. 

According to the Justice Department, over 50 defendants have been charged with conspiracy, ranging from conspiring to obstruct a congressional proceeding to conspiring to obstruct law enforcement. 

Sixteen individuals – members of the far-right groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – have been charged with seditious conspiracy for their alleged actions that day, three of whom have pleaded guilty to the charge. 

But the investigation is not close to being over. The Justice Department is still looking for over 350 individuals who they say “committed violent acts on Capitol grounds.” 

Most recently: A Capitol rioter pleaded guilty Friday to carrying a loaded firearm on Capitol grounds and assaulting police officers with one of their own batons during the Jan. 6 attack.

Mark Mazza told federal investigators he regretted not seeing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the riot and that they would be talking “for another reason” if he had seen her. He faces a maximum of 20 years for assaulting officers with a dangerous weapon.  

According to the plea agreement, Mazza, 57, carried a revolver loaded with shotgun and hollow point rounds in a holster under his shirt during the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the riot and on Capitol grounds later that day.  

The fourth Jan. 6 hearing this month is about to start. Here are some key points to catch up on before the next hearing gets underway.

Former President Trump didn’t want the Capitol riot to stop

During the committee's first prime-time hearing, it revealed testimony from Trump White House officials who said the former president did not want the US Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop. He angrily resisted his advisers urging him to call off the rioters and thought his own vice president “deserved” to be hanged, according to the testimony.

Vice Chair Liz Cheney described a witness who said Trump was aware of chants to “hang Mike Pence” and seemed to approve of them.

Later, at the hearing last week, the committee sought to connect Trump's pressure campaign against Pence to the violence on Jan. 6 by weaving together testimony from Pence aides, as well as Trump's public statements and comments from rioters at the Capitol.

Many of the rioters had listened to Trump's rallies where he claimed — inaccurately — that the election was rigged against him, and Pence had the power to do something about it while presiding over the Electoral College certification, the committee said.

And many of them saw, in real time, Trump's tweet criticizing Pence while the Capitol was under attack, where he said Pence "didn't have the courage to do what should have been done."

The committee showed that the mob got about 40 feet from Pence.

John Eastman knew his theory to overturn the election was illegal

The hearing underscored how John Eastman, a former Trump attorney, had pushed over and over for Pence to try to overturn the election, despite facing sharp resistance from White House lawyers and Pence's team.

The committee showed memos in which Eastman laid out his theory. Witnesses from Pence's legal team testified that there was nothing in the Constitution or US law that supported the scheme. The committee played testimony from video depositions where White House officials explained how they thought Eastman's theory was "nutty" before Jan. 6 — and told him so. Former Pence attorney Greg Jacob described Eastman's plans as "certifiably crazy."

On the evening of Jan. 6 — after rioters had attacked the Capitol and forced the vice president and his team to flee — Eastman tried to leverage the delay in certification by arguing there had been a minor violation of the Electoral Count Act and Pence should delay for 10 days as a result.

Jacob also testified that Eastman told him that he knew the theory would lose at the Supreme Court unanimously. Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani a few days after Jan. 6 and asked to be included on a list of potential recipients of a presidential pardon, the committee said.

Trump was told Eastman's plan was illegal but tried it anyway

According to witness testimony, Pence himself and the lawyer who concocted the scheme advised Trump directly that the plan was unconstitutional and violated federal law. Committee members argued that this shows Trump's corrupt intentions and could lay the groundwork for a potential indictment.

In a videotaped deposition, which was played Thursday, Pence's chief of staff Marc Short said Pence advised Trump "many times" that he didn't have the legal or constitutional authority to overturn the results while presiding over the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to count the electoral votes.

Even Eastman, who pitched the scheme to Trump, admitted in front of Trump that the plan would require Pence to violate federal law, according to a clip of a deposition from Jacob.

Legal scholars from across the political spectrum agree that Eastman's plan was preposterous. J. Michael Luttig, the former federal judge who advised Pence during the transition, testified that he "would have laid my body across the road" before letting Pence illegally overturn the election.

Committee argues Trump peddled fraud claims after he was personally told they were not legitimate

One of the primary areas of focus of the committee has been to underscore the idea that Trump and some of his allies continued to peddle false claims of election fraud after they were personally told those claims were not legitimate.

The committee made the argument that Trump was repeatedly told by his own top officials, including former Attorney General William Barr and ex-Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, that the myriad of fraud claims he was pushing were groundless and were certainly not evidence that the election was stolen.

Yet, Trump and some of his allies continued to push these false claims all the way through January in what the committee attempted to show was a bad-faith effort to overturn the election despite consistently being told those claims were not valid.

Trump’s team and family turn against him

The committee’s first hearing was bolstered with never-before-seen video clips showing members of Trump’s White House and campaign – as well as his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner – speaking about how they didn’t believe Trump’s claims that the election was stolen.

Barr said that Trump’s claims of voter fraud were “bullshit.” Ivanka Trump said that she respected Barr and “accepted what he was saying” about the election.

Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said a campaign data staffer told Trump in “pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”

And the committee cited testimony from Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon, who testified he told Meadows by “mid-to-late November” that the campaign had come up empty trying to find widespread fraud in key states that Trump lost. Cannon said Meadows responded to his assessment by saying, “so there’s no there there.”