Your Evening Briefing: Congress Begins Its Hearings on the Jan. 6 Attack

Seventeen months after the world witnessed the unthinkable, a violent mob including white supremacists and so-called militia members ransacking the heart of American democracy, the institution that was under siege that day will unveil the results of an historic investigation into what many have labeled an insurrection. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack, in which followers of Donald Trump sought to block the transfer of power to Joe Biden, led to Trump’s unprecedented second impeachment. Timothy L. O’Brien writes in Bloomberg Opinion that labels like attack or riot won’t do to describe that day: It was nothing other than an attempted coup.

With testimony beginning tonight including Trump family members and powerful witnesses to the events that day, Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the Jan. 6 committee, said the goal is to explain “how in the most established democracy in the world we came so close to losing everything. And most importantly the danger that remains.” The assault, which claimed a half dozen lives and resulted in scores of severely wounded law enforcement personnel, also triggered one of the biggest criminal investigations in US history. And on Thursday, Ryan Kelley, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan, became its latest target.