Jury out on impact of Jan 6 hearings

Federal prosecutors will be skittish about charging Trump, and some polls show proceedings have had little effect on Republican sentiments

- Charissa Yong

Over the course of six hearings last month, the US House of Representatives committee investigating last year’s Jan 6 attack on the Capitol laid out how then President Donald Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, despite knowing he had legitimately lost and his actions could be illegal.

In the first two hearings, the committee presented testimonies from key figures in Mr Trump’s orbit that the president had repeatedly been told he had lost the election.

But Mr Trump persisted with his claims of widespread election fraud, the committee sought to show, leading to the Jan 6 riot which committee chairman Bennie Thompson called the “culmination of an attempted coup”.

The committee also presented previously unseen footage of rioters and live testimony from Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who described how she “was slipping in people’s blood”.