Shouts from law enforcement calling for backup rang through a packed committee room on Capitol Hill as never-before-seen video played in a near minute-by-minute accounting of the events on January 6, 2021.
"I'm not allowed to say what's going to happen today because everyone's gonna have to watch for themselves," one woman ominously said into a camera early on the morning of that day. "But it's gonna happen. Something's gonna happen."
Something did happen. Within hours, protestors breached the U.S. Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results and see former President Donald Trump declared the winner. 
The new footage served as a centerpiece of the first public hearing of the House Select Committee Investigating the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol. It was this new view of the events of the day, as well as first-person testimony from Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, which brought the full weight of the day back to the present. 
Edwards is believed to be the first law enforcement officer injured in the Capitol attack. She was attacked with a bike rack that had been used as a barricade, causing her to fall backward and hit her head on a set of stairs behind her, lose consciousness, and suffer a concussion.
Once she regained consciousness, she continued to fight the onslaught of rioters, describing a "war scene" on the Capitol grounds.
U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Harry Dunn, right, and Sandra Garza, the long-time partner of Capitol Hill Police Officer Brian Sicknick who died shortly after the Jan. 6 attack, left, react as a video of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is played during a public hearing of the House select committee investigating the attack is held on Capitol Hill, Thursday, June 9, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
"They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I was slipping in people's blood," she said. "It was carnage. It was chaos. I can't even describe what I saw. Never in my wildest dreams did I think as a police officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle."
The committee also heard live testimony from documentary filmmaker Nick Quested. He and his crew were embedded with the extremist group the Proud Boys during the post-election period in late 2020 and on Jan. 6, 2021. The committee featured much of the footage Quested and his crew captured, which had not been shown publicly before Thursday.
In kicking off this first hearing in primetime, Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss. 2nd District) sought to tie the events of that day directly to the words of the former president, who repeatedly and falsely declared the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent. 
"We're going to remind you of the reality of what happened that day. But our work must do much more than just look backwards. Because our democracy remains in danger," Thompson said. 
He did not stop there though, warning there is still a conspiracy to thwart the will of the people — a warning that rings particularly poignant less than five months out from a nationwide midterm election. 
U.S. Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards testifies as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its first public hearing to reveal the findings of a year-long investigation, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, June 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
"There are those in this country who thirst for power but have no love or respect for what makes America great: devotion to the Constitution, allegiance to the rule of law, our shared journey to build a more perfect Union," Thompson continued. 
Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) then systematically laid out events that took place around and inside the White House and the Trump presidential campaign after the 2020 election, distilling more than a thousand interviews and tens of thousands of pages of documents that will be detailed more in hearings to come.  
Cheney also previewed those upcoming hearings, revealing that each of them will focus on a specific aspect of the lead-up to and day of the attack and provide a holistic look at President Trump's "sophisticated, seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election."
The second hearing, set to take place on Monday morning, will focus on Trump and his advisers' knowledge that he lost the 2020 election but still engaged in an effort to spread misinformation and false claims of voter fraud and a "stolen" election.
"We're going to take a close look at the first part of Trump's attack on the rule of law, when he hit the fuse that ultimately resulted in the violence of Jan. 6," Thompson said of Monday's hearing.
The third hearing will examine Trump's plan to replace the U.S. attorney general with a loyalist figure to use the Department of Justice to spread his election lies. 
In previewing this portion of the investigation, Cheney revealed Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa. 10th District) and other Republican members of Congress contacted the White House in the weeks after Jan. 6, 2021, to seek presidential pardons for their role in undermining the 2020 election results.
Perry is one of a handful of Republican members to receive a subpoena from the select committee but refuse to testify. Others include House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif. 23rd District) and Reps. Jim Jordan (Ohio 4th District), Andy Biggs (Ariz. 5th District), and Mo Brooks (Ala. 5th District).
A video showing former White House Advisor Ivanka Trump speaking during an interview with the Jan. 6th Committee is shown as committee members from left to right, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., look on, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its first public hearing to reveal the findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 9, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The fourth hearing, Cheney said, will feature the committee's findings relating to Trump's attempts to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to go along with a plan to subvert the counting of the Electoral College votes to keep Trump in power.
Cheney previewed witnesses and documents the committee would share in the hearing, including an email exchange between Gregory Jacobs, counsel for Pence, and John Eastman, the attorney who worked with the Trump team in the lead-up to Jan. 6. 
Eastman drafted a series of memos laying out a fringe legal theory claiming Vice President Pence could unilaterally reject the certified slates of electors from key states and essentially decide the election outcome himself. The Pence team ultimately rejected this argument.
"[T]hanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege," Jacobs wrote to Eastman two hours before the rioters breached the Capitol.
Cheney said the final hearings will focus on Trump's efforts to pressure state-level officials to create false slates of electors to hand him the election victory and examine how he "summoned" supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 and "directed" them to the Capitol.
Thompson and Cheney's opening statements included short video and audio clips of testimony from several major witnesses, including former Attorney General Bill Barr, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, as well as other Trump campaign and administration officials.
Thursday's events wrapped up with clips from some of the hundreds of plaintiffs charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol explaining what led them to participate in the deadly insurrection, previewing some of what is yet to come in these proceedings. 
"[Trump] personally asked for us to come to DC that day. And I thought, for everything he's done for us, if this is the only thing he's going to ask of me, I'll do it," said Eric Barber who has been charged with theft and unlawful demonstration for his role on January 6. 
Matthew Walter, another participant in the attack and a member of the Proud Boys, a far right extremist group, remembered being attracted to the promise of hearing directly from the former president. 
"He said 'I have something very important to say on January 6' or something like that is what got me interested to be there," Walter recalled in a deposition with the committee. 
Now, the challenge for the committee is keeping the momentum it built Thursday with emotional testimony and visual presentations through the upcoming series of scheduled hearings. But it is clear after the first proceeding the committee members are prepared to tell the American people what is at stake. 
"Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy," Thompson said. "And ultimately Donald Trump, the president of the United States, spurred a mob of domestic enemies of the constitution to march down to the Capitol and subvert American democracy."