Donald Trump bizarrely claimed on Tuesday that the January 6 committee was postponing a hearing and changing course after not seeing the viewership that lawmakers had hoped for despite news that the panel’s first public meeting last week rivaled some Sunday Night Football events in terms of ratings.

The ex-president’s theory came in the form of a “Truth” from his new Truth Social platform, which the president has vowed to remain on even if he is readmitted to Facebook and Twitter, where he remains banned.

John Bowden reports.

Former president Donald Trump’s decision to lie about the nature of the 2020 election came after his top advisers told him there was no basis to claim he had won, witnesses told the House 6 January select committee.

The panel’s second hearing focused on what a committee aide described as “Trump’s Big Lie” – the collection of outrageous theories and accusations Mr Trump and his allies floated to justify his election night claim of victory.

The Independent’s Washington, DC team review the second hearing.

Skylar Baker-Jordan writes:

Over the weekend, 31 members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front were arrested in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Police allege they were conspiring to riot at a Pride Parade in the northern Idaho city, just over the state line from Spokane, Washington. No one was injured thanks to the quick thinking of a concerned citizen who phoned police after seeing the men pile into a U-Haul, where they were found with riot gear and at least one smoke grenade.

One of those arrested was the group’s founder and leader, Thomas Rousseau. If that name sounds familiar to you, it is because Rousseau was at the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where a MAGA extremist drove his car into a crowd of anti-racist protestors, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Donald Trump’s niece Mary Trump said in an interview that she believes the ex-president was accusing Ivanka Trump of “perjury” after he raged at his daughter following the airing of her testimony to the panel investigating the January 6 riot last week.

Joanna Chisholm has the story.

George Conway, husband to former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, mocked his wife’s ex-boss for having “scrambled eggs” for brains after day two of the January 6 committee’s public hearings concluded.

Speaking on CNN, the conservative attorney reacted to testimony from Bill Stepien and other Trump campaign figures who explained at Monday’s hearing how Donald Trump ignored the advice of “Team Normal” and instead pursued a plan to overturn the election spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani and other conspiracy-slingers.

John Bowden reports from Washington, DC.

ABC News’ Ben Siegel cites a January 6 committee aid as saying there are a number of reasons for the postponement of Wednesday’s hearing.

“The postponement is due to a number of scheduling factors, including production timeline and availability of members and witnesses.”

Rudy Giuliani’s broadside against witnesses who testified to his being drunk on election night 2020 focused on two Trump staffers in particular: Jason Miller and Bill Stepien. And as politicos have noticed, the two have in common the unusual fact that they both worked on Mr Giuliani’s benighted 2008 presidential campaign.

Mr Giuliani’s presidential campaign looked very strong in 2007, largely thanks to healthy fundraising, but his strategy of skipping the early primaries to focus on delegate-rich Florida proved to be a disaster. In the end, he spent tens of millions of dollars without winning a single state.

The January 6 panel appears to be divided on the question of whether or not to refer Donald Trump to the Justice Department on potential criminal charges, with Bennie Thompson appearing to rule it out yesterday before being contradicted by Liz Cheney and others.

However, the point is arguably moot: the Department of Justice does not need a referral to proceed with a criminal investigation if it believes the evidence is available, and by the same token, it would not be bound to bring charges against Mr Trump just because the committee sent it a letter.

Read more:

Republican Congressman Barry Loudermilk has been under scrutiny over a Capitol tour he gave to constituents on 5 January 2021 – one of several incidents that some have speculated could have given rioters a chance to get the lie of the land before the events of the riot.

Mr Loudermilk has denied that the tour had any such intention, but it remains a matter of interest to investigators. And now, the US Capitol Police have written to the House Administration committee explaining waht they know about the tour.

Among other things, the letter says that one of Mr Loudermilk’s staffers welcomed 12 people to the Rayburn building next to the Capitol, with three others joining them, that they moved between the three House office buildings, and that there is no evidence they entered the Capitol. “We do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious,” the letter concludes.

Sometime Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was a major theme of yesterday’s select committee hearing, with various witnesses describing his alleged drunken behaviour on the night of the 2020 election and holding him responsible for feeding Donald Trump unhinged conspiracy theories.

Mr Giuliani, who testified to the committee in May after a row over whether or not his session would be recorded, has now lashed out at the story, insisting he restricted himself to soda on the night in question.

Read more about his supposed inebriation from Gustaf Kilander.