‘The evidence speaks for itself’: Luria says Jan. 6 hearings will lay out results of a thorough investigation

A fellow member of Congress’s Jan. 6 committee thinks the hearings that started Thursday will “blow the roof off,” but Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Virginia Beach, thinks Americans will hear a dispassionate and comprehensive overview of months of effort to overturn the 2020 election.

“I think the evidence speaks for itself,” she said in an interview Wednesday. “I hope people will listen, and make their determinations, letting the facts speak for themselves.”

The committee has heard 1,000 witnesses and received more than 140,000 documents. Over the next few weeks, in six hearings, it will share what it’s heard and read.

From her seat on the committee, Luria said it adds up to a monthslong effort to overturn the election, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

What she’s seen, and what she thinks the public will see, is that then-president Donald Trump tried to stay in power, claiming he really won the election, although he knew that he had in fact lost it. That matters because it meets definitions of acting corruptly.

The effort included:

* pressuring state officials to refuse to certify the results,

*an effort to place a Trump loyalist as Attorney General in order to use the Department of Justice to force Georgia officials to overturn that state’s election results;

* an effort to certify false electors for the Electoral College vote;

* pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes for President-elect Joe Biden when Congress met Jan. 6 to certify the results.

The hearings willdetail what extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys did to organize and incite the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, she said. Leaders of both have been indicted recently on charges of seditious conspiracy.

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Luria, recalling the oath she took as a 17-year-old joining the Navy to preserve and protect the Constitution, said she wants listeners to think about the 187 minutes in which Trump did nothing to tell his supporters to end the violence that day.

“It was to preserve and protect against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” she said of that oath. “The president is commander in chief ... and it was 187 minutes.”

The hearings will be a bit different than the usual Congressional hearing. Instead of the usual round robin of legislators, each with a set, short period to ask questions or, often, simply make a speech, each of the committee’s sessions will focus on a particular issue, with one or two committee members taking the lead in the presentations.

Later this summer or early fall, the committee will prepare formal conclusions and recommendations.

While Republican Congressional leaders and Trump have attacked the committee as partisan, Luria noted that efforts to set up an independent commission died in the Senate, in the face of GOP reluctance. She said House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who has since been subpoenaed by the committee, declined to name any Republicans to it after Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and Rep. Jim Banks, both of who voted to challenge Biden’s election on Jan. 6.

“People have heard lots of tidbits, our aim is to give them a comprehensive picture,” Luria said.

Dave Ress, 757-247-4535, dress@dailypress.com