CARDS ON THE TABLE — The Jan. 6 committee will return with possibly its last public hearing Thursday, a closing argument to conclude the panel’s blockbuster summer series. After a postponement due to Hurricane Ian, the committee will now convene less than a month from Election Day, when voters will make their own judgments on the weight of the evidence presented. A lot has happened in Trump world since the last time Americans saw the committee lay out the facts about the violent Capitol attack and the former president’s role in the scheme to hold onto power. The Justice Department is now investigating Donald Trump for his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House, and New York Attorney General Tish James has sued Trump, his company and his children, accusing them of large-scale fraudulent financial practices. With those developments serving as a backdrop, now the committee returns to the public spotlight. It has one last opportunity to lay out its case to Americans before it wraps up its investigation by the end of the congressional session. To get a sense of what to expect from Thursday’s hearing and what we might learn, Nightly chatted over Slack with POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney. It’s been a minute since we’ve had a public hearing. What would you say the committee has accomplished so far? A lot of what the public knows about Trump’s attempt to subvert the 2020 election and seize a second term is because of the select committee’s work. Much of it came in the form of court filings against figures like John Eastman and Mark Meadows, as well as in the correspondence between the select committee and other witnesses who they’ve sought to interview. While the DOJ was publicly piecing together the elements of the physical attack on the Capitol, the select committee jump-started the public’s understanding of what was happening at a higher level, among Trump, his aides and his enablers as he attempted to marshal forces inside and outside government to prevent Joe Biden’s inauguration. Now we’re seeing DOJ subpoena many of the same people the committee targeted months earlier. After a string of stunning hearings this summer, it feels like there’s a decent amount of pressure on this last one. What do you think the committee wants to accomplish Thursday, and do you think members will have the final act they’re hoping for? So far, we’ve learned relatively little about what the committee will feature in their final hearing, but they’ve promised it will be of the same caliber as the previous eight. We know the committee has obtained new footage of Trump ally Roger Stone in the weeks following the 2020 election, and we know they’ve conducted a series of interviews with members of Trump’s Cabinet about their discussions surrounding the 25th Amendment and whether to invoke it to remove Trump from power for the final two weeks of his presidency. And the panel also says it has obtained a significant trove of information from the Secret Service in the last couple of weeks. So they will probably lean heavily into the new material. We also know they attempted to obtain testimony from Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, who sued the committee on Sept. 25 to block a subpoena. They wanted Vos’ testimony about a call Trump made to him in July, pressuring him to support a measure decertifying the election in Wisconsin (which is not legally possible). So the panel is clearly focused on things that happened even after Trump’s presidency. Has the Mar-a-Lago investigation or the James suit muddied the waters for the committee at all, or diminished their work in any way? I think they’ve certainly crowded out the committee in the headlines, particularly as the panel has been largely dark since July. The committee, though, has continued actively investigating and is likely to do so all the way through the finish line at the end of the congressional session. They’re aware that Thursday’s hearing comes against a very different backdrop than the one we saw pre-Mar-a-Lago. But while that may be a test for the public (and media’s) attention span, it doesn’t diminish the significant and urgent nature of the threats to democracy that they’ve shed light on. We’re quickly approaching Election Day, and Dems have really highlighted the threat to democracy as a key issue for voters. Do we have any read on what kind of impact the committee could have in November? Well, the trope we heard for much of the year was that voters would not be thinking about this stuff when they go to the polls, particularly because Trump is not on the ballot. But Trump’s prevalence in the news, amid the traffic jam of investigations that we just discussed, has actually kept him and his polarizing presence at the forefront of voters’ minds, and I think we’ve seen Democrats lean into that in the closing weeks of the election cycle. Polls show voters do largely consider Trump culpable for what happened on Jan. 6 and are fearful about the state of democracy. The select committee’s hearings, which drew pretty significant viewership, may have played a role in that broader perception. The committee will also release a report soon. What do you expect from that? I actually think it’s likely to come out in December, and I expect it to be a thorough distillation of their most potent evidence about how the attack on the Capitol unfolded, with a detailed analysis of Trump’s central role in motivating and stoking the forces that ultimately marched on the Capitol in his name. I suspect it’ll be organized in multiple chapters of volumes covering different themes related to the attack — similar to the way the hearings were divided. I’m most interested in whether the committee also releases its 1,000-plus transcripts, which could contain enormous quantities of new evidence that the select committee has yet to reveal. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@politico.com. Or contact tonight’s author at mward@politico.com or on Twitter at @MyahWard.
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