While I was watching the select committee's hearing today, two relevant pieces of news came out. One was that yesterday, the FBI conducted a pre-dawn search of the suburban Virginia home of Jeffrey Clark one of today's hearing's arch villains. His electronic devices were seized and he was dragged out into the street in his pajamas. As several witnesses-- and Adam Kinzinger-- made clear today, Clark was central to Trump’s unsuccessful effort "to strong-arm the nation’s top prosecutors into supporting his claims of election fraud.
The second news item, that came out-- while I was trying to concentrate on Matt Gaetz's failed maneuver to turn his request for a sedition and insurrection pardon request into one that would cover the sex crimes the FBI is investigating-- was Maggie Haberman's story about the committee taking testimony from British documentary filmmaker Alex Holder behind closed doors this morning. Holder had extensive access to Trump and his cronies before and after the election, including 11 hours "with the Trump family discussing the campaign and the election for a planned documentary called Unprecedented. All the footage had already been subpoenaed and viewed by the committee staffers.
In an interview with the New York Times after his testimony, Holder said the committee’s investigators asked very specific questions about his footage and his experience with the Trump family. But he declined to provide a detailed account of what the committee’s questions had focused on.
Holder said he went into his interviews with Trump believing that the president could not actually believe what he was saying about the election but ended up being persuaded otherwise.
“After that interview, I remember being struck by how wrong I was,” he said. “He 100 percent believed the election was taken from him.”
He declined to say what Trump revealed about his thinking about the attack on the Capitol by his supporters. But in a video clip shared with the Washington Post, and confirmed by a person with access to it, Trump said his supporters that day “were angry from the standpoint of what happened in the election because they’re smart, and they see. And they saw what happened. I believe that that was a big part of what happened on Jan. 6.”
One person close to the Trump family said that they had believed they would have some editorial control over the project, which Holder denied.