From the newsroom of the Washington Post.

It's Robert Samuels from the Washington Post.

Posts, Sarah Kaplan.

Hi, this is Elahi Azari with the Washington Post.

This is Post Reports.

I'm Martine Powers.

It's Monday, July 26th.

Today, the battle over a new January 6th committee.

And the firefighters at risk when wildfires burn hotter and longer.

On Tuesday, we're going to have the first hearing in this select committee's investigation of the events and the causes that led to the events of January 6th.

Reporter Karin D'Amurjan is covering this House Committee.

It's made up of two Republicans and seven Democrats, all approved by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

This committee is the latest attempt from Democrats to understand what happened during the insurrection and what led up to it.

We're going to be hearing from four police officers, two from the DC Metropolitan Police Force and two from the Capitol Police Force, who were part of the response, who experienced various harrowing forms of verbal physical and other forms of abuse that day as they were trying to protect the Capitol.

And whose stories are not? They have been public. They have even been advocates, some of them, for approaching an investigation of the sixth and other ways.

Keep in mind this select committee, which is made up right now, of seven Democrats and two Republicans, but two Republicans who were appointed by the Democratic Speaker, is the Plan B.

The initial plan was to try to put together an independent commission made up of outside experts who are not currently serving in government that would have been equally weighted between Democrats and Republicans.

There was a fairly strong bipartisan endorsement of the idea of this independent commission coming from the House. It died in the Senate.

And so we ended up here, which is that the House Speaker has put together this select committee to look into these matters.

So I'm wondering more largely, what is this panel hoping to achieve? Like, what do we not know about January 6th that this panel is supposed to be investigating?

Well, top line, everybody is saying we're going to get to the truth about what happened and what caused it. We're going to find out who was to blame. We're going to find out what the vulnerabilities were. We're going to find out what we're going to do to make ourselves safer.

But when you drill down, they haven't articulated how they're going to do that yet. You have some people on the panel saying, well, look, we have to look at the vulnerabilities in the Capitol.

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