Good morning. It's Sunday, July 17th. I'm Sam Stein in for my friend Ali Valshi.

We are just days away from the eighth and potentially final public hearing from the House Select Committee

investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. The prime time hearing is set to focus on what Representative Liz Cheney calls the 187 minutes

that Donald Trump did nothing while the attack was ongoing,

essentially bringing together everything from the committee has laid out so far in its historic hearings.

It is unknown if the recent revelation that the Secret Service erased text

from January 5th and 6 will play a part in the hearing, although the Select Committee has

subpoenaed the agency, which says it is cooperating. Thursday's hearing will take place just over a

week after the last public hearing, which focused on how far-right extremist groups participated in the

insurrection, and also the direct and indirect coordination between those groups and several of

the former president's people. That hearing also featured video testimony from former White House

counsel Pat Cipollone, including his first-hand account of a raucous, yes, truly raucous December 18th,

2020 meeting in the Oval Office. That meeting involves some really strange figures,

the former overstock.com guy, Patrick Byrne. The I'm sure the four-seasoned landscaping is related

to the hotel guy, Rudy Giuliani, the maybe Venezuela interfered in our elections

woman, Cindy Powell, all reportedly pushing the former president to overturn the election,

seize voting machines, and even invoke martial law.

In the case of Michael Flynn, the former lieutenant general who lied to the FBI and got a parting

guy, he was pushing

simply to rerun the election in specific places where Trump lost.

But the former president's quest to control the election results didn't end there.

We can now add another mysterious character to that list, William J. Olson, an attorney who now

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