The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riots on Capitol Hill has postponed a hearing that would include Trump administration Justice Department officials.
The hearing had been set for Wednesday, but on Tuesday morning the committee announced that it had been postponed. A spokesperson said it was due “to a number of scheduling factors, including the production schedule and the availability of members and witnesses.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren said the postponement was intended to give staff more time to prepare for the committee’s lengthy video presentations. “It’s just technical problems. The staff that put all the videos together, you know, doing 1, 2, 3, was overwhelming. So we’re trying to give them a little bit of space to do their job,” she said.
The committee will meet Thursday for a hearing that was already on the schedule. Lofgren indicated that the agenda and witness list for that meeting will remain the same.
Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said the schedule “has always been fluid” and that Wednesday’s hearing will “probably” be moved to next week.
Witnesses at Wednesday’s hearing are expected to include Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general at the time of the Capitol insurrection, as well as two other former top officials, Richard Donoghue and Steven Engel.
They were expected to testify about a tense January 3, 2021 White House meeting in which then-President Donald Trump weighed whether to replace Rosen with a lower-ranking official, Jeffrey Clark, who had expressed a willingness to defend the Trump’s false claims of voter fraud.
Trump abandoned the idea when several Justice Department and White House lawyers told him they would resign if that happened.
