The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the US Capitol opened a landmark set of hearings on Thursday by showing video of aide after aide to former President Donald J. Trump testifying that his claims of a stolen election were false, as the panel laid out in meticulous detail the extent of the former President’s efforts to keep himself in office.

Over about two hours, the panel offered new information about what it characterised as an attempted coup orchestrated by Trump that culminated in the deadly assault on the Capitol. The panel’s leaders revealed that investigators heard testimony that Trump endorsed the hanging of his own vice-president as a mob of his supporters descended on Congress. They also said they had evidence that members of Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

The session kicked off an ambitious effort by the nine-member committee, which was formed after Republicans blocked the creation of a nonpartisan commission, to lay out the full story of a remarkable assault on US democracy, orchestrated by a sitting president, that led to a deadly riot, an impeachment and a crisis of confidence in the political system.

“Donald Trump was at the centre of this conspiracy,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee. “And ultimately, Donald Trump, the President of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the Constitution to march down the Capitol and subvert American democracy.”

The prime-time hearing featured dramatic video of the Proud Boys, a Right-wing extremist group, leading the assault on the Capitol, and the emotional testimony of a Capitol Police officer who suffered a traumatic brain injury at the hands of the mob.

“What I saw was a war scene,” the officer, Caroline Edwards, one of the more than 150 officers injured in the rampage, testified. “I saw officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up.”

She added: “I was slipping on people’s blood. It was carnage. It was chaos.”

Officer Edwards’s appearance reflected the potency of the committee’s seamless two-hour presentation — including never-before-seen video — in bringing home the violence of that day all over again.

The committee is publicly telling the story of how a sitting President undertook unprecedented efforts to overturn a democratic election, testing the guardrails of American democracy at every turn. Trump and his allies challenged President Biden’s victory in the courts, at state houses and, finally, in the streets.

“You will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had in fact lost the election,” said Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the

vice- chairwoman and one

of two Republicans on the panel.

“But despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the US population that fraud had stolen the election.”

Using previously unreleased video of testimony from former Trump aides and even his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, the panel left little doubt about the truth of the former President’s actions. In doing so, its leaders said they hoped to force the nation to grapple with a dark chapter in its history.

“Our democracy remains in danger,” Thompson said.

New York Times News Service