When they return to Washington next week, House Democrats plan to mark the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol with an informal hearing that will highlight Republicans’ efforts to rewrite the history of a riot by a pro-Trump mob.
Because Democrats are in the minority, they cannot call an official congressional hearing. But throughout Mr. Trump’s second term, Democratic lawmakers have held informal events meant to draw public attention to their criticisms of the administration.
In a letter sent Monday to the Democratic caucus, Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, said the hearing, set for Tuesday of next week, would highlight Mr. Trump’s broad clemency to rioters seeking to reverse his loss in the 2020 election, some of whom have been rearrested on other charges. He also said that lawmakers would explore “ongoing threats to free and fair elections posed by an out-of-control Trump administration.”
But with Democrats preparing for midterm elections in which they seek to win control of the House, Mr. Jeffries made clear that the hearing was meant to counter Republicans’ efforts to sanitize the storming of the Capitol.
“In the years since that disgraceful day, far-right Republicans in Congress have repeatedly attempted to rewrite history and whitewash the events of Jan. 6,” Mr. Jeffries wrote.
The mob of Trump loyalists that attacked the Capitol that day caused millions of dollars in damage, injured more than 140 police officers and, for the first time in U.S. history, interrupted the certification of a presidential election.
Next Tuesday’s hearing will be led by Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, who led the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the attack, held widely viewed hearings in 2022 and issued a report on Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss.
But the coming hearing, held by a party with little power to conduct oversight or compel action, will likely demonstrate just how much the dynamics around Jan. 6 have shifted in the year since Mr. Trump returned to power.
Though he once disavowed the rioters, Mr. Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign increasingly called them patriots and suggested they had been unfairly treated by the Justice Department.
The president opened his second term by granting clemency to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack, including those who had assaulted police officers as they tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power.
Earlier this year, Speaker Mike Johnson announced a new Republican-led subcommittee that would again investigate attack and counter “false narratives” about it, part of a larger Republican project to recast the riot.
That panel, led by Representative Barry Loudermilk of Georgia, has yet to hold a hearing. But Mr. Loudermilk has said one of its targets would be the once-stalled investigation into the planting of pipe bombs outside the Republican and Democratic Party headquarters in Washington the night before the attack.
Earlier this month, officials arrested a Virginia man in connection with the pipe bombs, which had been at the center of right-wing conspiracies.
According to court documents released on Sunday, the man, Brian J. Cole Jr., told federal agents that he felt the need to “speak up” after he began to believe that the 2020 election had been tampered with.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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