New hearings loom in Capitol attack probe

Plate accusation

Trump's anger had become so uncontrollable in the weeks after the 2020 election that when he was told in December that Attorney General William Barr had said publicly that there was no widespread election fraud, Trump threw a plate of lunch at a wall in a White House dining room, shattering the plate and leaving ketchup dripping down the wall, Hutchinson testified.

Trump denied this, saying: "Never. Never. Not my thing. And I never did it anywhere else, either."

The day after Hutchinson testified, Trump and his allies rounded on her.

"The lies and fabricated stories being told to the partisan Highly Unselect Committee, not only by the phony social climber who got caught yesterday, but by many others, are a disgrace to our, in serious decline, Nation," Trump wrote the next morning on his social media platform.

At the end of Hutchinson's two-hour testimony, Cheney hinted at yet another potential area of liability, suggesting that Trump and his allies could be engaging to tamper with witnesses and obstruct the committee's work.

Despite the gripping testimony given by Hutchinson and others during the hearings, the latest Monmouth University Poll released on Tuesday suggests that the hearings have not moved opinion among the US public.

Patrick Murray, director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said, "The sensational revelations during the hearings do not seem to have moved the public opinion needle on Trump's culpability for either the riot or his spurious election fraud claims."

The poll showed that 38 percent of the public thought Trump was directly responsible for what happened on Jan 6. Another 26 percent said Trump was not directly responsible, but he encouraged those involved, and 32 percent said Trump did nothing wrong regarding Jan 6. Just 5 percent of Republicans said Trump was directly responsible and 23 percent said he encouraged those involved.

When asked how to describe the incident at the Capitol building, 64 percent said "riot" was appropriate, 52 percent said "insurrection" was appropriate, while 35 percent said it was appropriate to call it a legitimate protest.

Moreover, 29 percent of US citizens－including six in 10 Republicans－continue to believe Joe Biden only won the 2020 presidential election due to voter fraud－unchanged from the June poll. These results are also similar to a Monmouth poll taken last year before the committee was formed.

The poll found that 41 percent of US citizens－including 73 percent of Democrats－favor charging Trump with crimes related to his involvement in the Jan 6 attack, while 34 percent are opposed－including 66 percent of Republicans. Another 25 percent are unsure.

The public was divided on whether having Trump stand trial would help (31 percent) or hurt (35 percent) the stability of the nation's political system, while another 30 percent said this would have no impact on the country overall.

Murray said: "When we released our June poll, I said the committee was preaching to the choir. These current results suggest they haven't recruited any new singers since then."