First up will be wrenching accounts from police who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the mob, with testimony from US Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who was seriously injured in the attack.
Also appearing on Thursday will be documentary maker Nick Quested, who filmed the extremist Proud Boys storming the Capitol.
Some of that group’s members have since been indicted, as have some from the Oath Keepers, on rare sedition charges over the military-style attack.
Along with the live eyewitness testimony, the panel will unveil multimedia presentations, including unreleased video and audio, and a “mountain of evidence”, said a committee aide who insisted on anonymity to preview the hearing.
There will be recorded accounts from Trump’s senior aides at the White House, the administration and the campaign, as well as members of Trump’s family, the aide said.
In the weeks ahead, the panel is expected to detail Trump’s public campaign to “Stop the Steal” and the private pressure he put on the Justice Department to reverse his election loss – despite dozens of failed court cases and his own attorney general attesting there was no fraud on a scale that could have tipped the results in his favor.
The panel, made up of nine lawmakers, faced obstacles from its start.
Republicans blocked the formation of an independent body that could have investigated the Jan 6 assault the way the 9/11 Commission probed the 2001 terror attack.
Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ushered the creation of the 1/6 panel through Congress over the objections of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
She rejected Republican-appointed lawmakers who had voted Jan 6 against certifying the election results, choosing her own preferred members to serve.
Trump has dismissed the investigation as illegitimate, and many Republicans are poised to defend him.
Rep Elise Stefanik of New York said at a GOP leadership news conference that the committee’s “shameless prime-time show” is nothing but a smear campaign against the former president, his party and his supporters.
But by many measures, the attack was set in motion shortly after election day, when Trump falsely claimed the voting was rigged and refused to concede once Biden was declared the winner.
The proceedings are expected to introduce Americans to a cast of characters, some well known, others elusive, and to what they said and did as Trump and his allies tried to reverse the election outcome.
The public will learn about the actions of Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, whose 2,000-plus text messages provided the committee with a snapshot of the real-time scramble to keep Trump in office; of John Eastman, the conservative law professor who was the architect of the unsuccessful scheme to convince vice president Mike Pence to halt the certification on Jan 6; and of the Justice Department officials who threatened to resign rather than go along with Trump’s startling proposals.
Lawmakers have also been caught up in the probe, including House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who defied the committee’s subpoena requests for testimony.
Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, who urged her father to call off the rioters, appeared privately before the committee.
The Justice Department has arrested and charged more than 800 people for the violence that day, the biggest dragnet in its history.
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