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The Jan. 6 committee postponed its Wednesday hearing and will next meet on Thursday

Witnesses swear in before a House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol hearing on Monday.
J. Scott Applewhite
/
AP
Witnesses swear in before a House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol hearing on Monday.

Updated June 14, 2022 at 12:00 PM ET

The third Jan. 6 committee hearing scheduled for Wednesday has been postponed to an as-yet unknown day, the panel said in a statement Tuesday.

The committee's release does not offer an explanation, but a source familiar said the move was a result of scheduling conflicts.

The committee's next hearing will take place Thursday, June 16.

Jan. 6 committee member Pete Aguilar said the hearing would likely be moved to next week, although he cautioned that the calendar continues to be fluid.

The panel scheduled seven total hearings throughout June to discuss their months-long investigation into the connection between former President Donald Trump's voter fraud conspiracy claims and the insurrection on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2020.

It is unclear how the postponement of Wednesday's hearing will impact the planned focus for each hearing the panel laid out last week.

Former Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who took over after William Barr left in the wake of the election, was scheduled to appear at Wednesday's hearing, along with former DOJ officials Richard Donoghue and Steven Engel. Wednesday's hearing was expected to focus on Trump's pressure on the Justice Department to spread election false claims.

Thursday's hearing was set to focus on the former president's pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes.

Members appear to disagree on whether the panel would issue criminal referrals to DOJ

Monday's hearing focused on Trump's role in perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was stolen as the panel continued to make its case that former was the central character responsible for what happened on Jan. 6. Trump responded Monday night with a 12-page statement that called the committee's investigation a sham and again pushed baseless voter fraud conspiracy theories.

Following Monday night's hearing, committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters that the committee would like not issue a recommendation to the Justice Department to press charges.

"If the Department of Justice looks at it and assumes that there's something that needs further review, I'm sure they will do it," Thompson said.

But ranking member Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., took to Twitter to quickly clarify that the committee "has not issued a conclusion regarding potential criminal referrals."

"We will announce a decision on that at an appropriate time," she said.

Attorney General Merrick Garland said on Mondaythat he is watching the House hearings as are the Justice Department lawyers prosecuting cases related to the attack on the Capitol.
Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

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Ximena Bustillo
Ximena Bustillo is a multi-platform reporter at NPR covering politics out of the White House and Congress on air and in print.