The various media stories that have been hyping up the January 6 commission hearings, which are slated to start this Thursday and be aired on prime-time TV, in an attempt to try and use it as a “political cudgel” will backfire and end up just hurting House Democrats, warned a longstanding adviser to the party.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) has been throwing out promises of bombshell new revelations, the panel as also taken the chance to hire a former television producer from ABC to head up the made-for-TV event, and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the committee, has been lobbying the other members to make use of the findings to try and change the entire process for presidential elections. However, David Axelrod, who was previously a head adviser for former President Obama, stated that the Democrats should just stick to presenting the strict facts and let the public come to its own conclusion.
“If I were a member of the 1/6 committee, stories like these, casting the hearings as a political cudgel, would make me very unhappy,” stated Axelrod. “Conversely, Rs, who hope to dismiss damning findings as partisan, will seize on them. Let facts speak for themselves.”
If I were a member of the 1/6 committee, stories like these, casting the hearings as a political cudgel, would make me very unhappy.
Conversely, Rs, who hope to dismiss damning findings as partisan, will seize on them.
Let facts speak for themselves. https://t.co/akQ827sAPD— David Axelrod (@davidaxelrod) June 7, 2022
Over the course of last year, the committee, which consists of seven Democrats and a pair of Republicans who have both found themselves estranged from the party, has carried out well over 1,000 interviews with witnesses and managed to gather 140,000 documents concerning the Capitol riots that took place just two weeks prior to the inauguration of President Joe Biden. It has been the intention of the panel to unveil its findings over the course of a series of eight hearings slated to air on prime-time television across multiple networks. The first of these is planned for Thursday at 8 p.m. ET. Raskin issued a promise that stated that the hearings would “blow the roof off the house.”
Currently, it is not known who is slated to be called in to testify during the hearings because the committee has, as of yet, refused to release the names of any of its proposed witnesses.
Democrats are attempting to try and hang the blame for the riots on the neck of former President Donald Trump, who the election results and encouraged the crowd of people in attendance at his speech earlier that day to “peacefully” walk over to the Capitol. In the wake of the riots erupting, Trump was called upon by members of both sides of the aisle to tell his supporters to stop, but he hesitated before actually doing it.
Schiff, who was the California Democrat who made claims throughout the Mueller Investigation to have powerful evidence that former President Trump colluded with Russia to attempt to steal the election in 2016 but only saw Trump cleared of the charge, stated that the public should be ready to get an extremely shocking revelation this coming week.
“Our goal is to present the narrative of what happened in this country, how close we came to losing our democracy, what led to the violence,” stated Schiff. “Americans I think know a great deal already — they have seen a number of bombshells already [and] there’s a great deal they haven’t seen. But perhaps the most important is the public has not seen it woven together, how one thing led to another.”
Raskin, who was reported by Axios to want to use the hearings as a way to get rid of the entire Electoral college, stated that the hearings will allow viewers to understand who was actually responsible for the riots.
“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here, and we’re gonna be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan. 6,” claimed the lawmaker.