Discovery + Behind the Mystery Donald Trump Docuseries This Is One Reason The Jan.6 Commission Will Extend Hearings In July

Exclusive: Representative Benny Thompson (D-MS), chairman of the January 6 committee, said Wednesday that the hearing schedule would continue until July.

Reason: new evidence obtained, including footage from British director Alex Holder, who is expected to speak before the committee on Thursday. According to Politico, Thompson called the footage he saw “important” but refused to process.

Deadline may reveal that the three-part series … Without precedents – Purchased from Discovery +. We heard that former BBC executive Greg Sanderson, who was previously the executive producer of the British public broadcaster’s documentary Storyville, was working on the project with Holder.

Holder said in a statement this week that the images are footage seen so far from the last six weeks of President Trump’s re-election campaign and the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol. The series includes interviews with Trump, his daughter Ivanka, his children Eric and Don Jr. and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as Vice President Mike Pence. Holder said he and his team are “fully cooperative” on the call.

Update: Warner Bros. Discovery confirmed the story and a spokesperson said, “Alex Holder Without precedents A three-part documentary on the 2020 election will be released on Discovery + by the end of the summer. Featuring footage of the Trump family’s pre-election campaign and their reaction to the election results, the documentary series will offer intimate and unprecedented interviews with Trump, his family and others who were in the White House.

It was previously unclear which streaming service had purchased the rights.

However, there is certainly some conundrum as to what’s in the documentary and how Holder got access to Trump and his inner circle.

Some members of Trump’s campaign were unaware of the project’s existence and were surprised when its existence emerged. But it’s a new type of scroll that potentially gives the committee more power when it approves a case against Trump because his hearings have had the biggest impact on the release of audio and video clips so far.

Some are well known: The New York Times reported Tuesday that in one of the interviews, Ivanka Trump appears to be supporting her father’s false claims about election fraud. You said, “You have to take this fight.” The Times also reported that the director gained access to the Trump family through Jason Greenblatt, then the White House spokesperson for the Middle East. Robert Costa of CBS News reports that Holder has 11-hour interviews with the Trump family from September 2020 to January 2021. On Wednesday on CBS Evening News, Costa also posted photos of Holder interviewing Trump and Ivanka Trump.

Holder said that one of the reasons why so little attention was paid to the project was that, due to the staff sale, “he previously did not have the legal authority to publish material or publicly discuss the project.”

Committee member Rep. Jamie Ruskin (D-MD) said he discovered the footage when “someone who knew contacted me, wrote me a letter, etc. He crossed the path. Maybe there were other contacts as well. “He refused to say if the director had contacted him.

Holder is perhaps best known as the producer of the documentary Keep Quiet, about the leader of Hungary’s far-right conservative party who, after expressing anti-Semitic convictions, discovers he is of Jewish origin. The world premiere of the film took place at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.

His lawyer did not comment on the decision to collaborate with the committee. Although there have been legal disputes so far over the transfer of documentaries to courts and other government agencies and other footage, the January 6 committee secured the cooperation of not only Holder but also Nick Quested, who testified at the first hearing on his project. . . The far-right group The Proud Boys.

In December, the Press Freedom Committee and 55 media organizations called The January 6 Committee refused to comment on the photojournalist’s free phone recordings, arguing that those recordings were protected by the First Amendment.

But Katie Townsend, legal director of the Reporters Committee, said it’s a different situation with these documentary makers because they have chosen to comply.

“Maybe they decided that obeying was a smart or ethical idea,” he said, adding that the images were tied to “a single event in American history.”

He also said their cooperation should not set a precedent for future work.

“Not only is it not a precedent for other directors, but I don’t think it’s necessarily a precedent for these individual directors,” he said.