The Daily Fuckup

On June 9, 2022, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack held its first public hearing, moving its work from a closed investigation into a televised public record. Congress had scheduled the session for 8:00 p.m. Eastern, with later hearings planned after that opening night.

The hearing’s purpose was straightforward: lay out, in sequence, what the committee said happened before, during, and after the attack on the Capitol. Rather than asking the public to piece together scattered claims and counterclaims, the committee used opening statements and evidence to present a timeline built from documents, testimony, and other records.

At the center of that record was the post-election pressure campaign. The committee said Donald Trump and his allies spent the weeks after the 2020 vote trying to undo the result, pressing state officials, lawyers, and political intermediaries while pushing unsupported fraud claims. The hearing was designed to connect those efforts to the events of Jan. 6 and show them as part of the same sequence.

That made the hearing more than a political milestone. It was the first time the committee put its case on the record in prime time, where the public could hear the evidence in one sitting instead of in fragments. The fight over Jan. 6 had already been buried under denial and spin. The hearing’s job was to force the chronology back into view.