A British filmmaker has given a House committee footage of former president Donald Trump and his inner circle taken before and after the Capitol attack.
The revelation of the never-before-seen footage came to light on Tuesday amid the committee’s public hearings when Alex Holder revealed he had complied with a congressional subpoena to turn over all of the footage he shot in the final weeks of Mr Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.
“When we began this project in September 2020, we could have never predicted that our work would one day be subpoenaed by Congress,” Mr Holder wrote in a statement on Twitter.
The filmmaker said the footage includes exclusive interviews with Mr Trump, his children and then-vice president Mike Pence while on the campaign trail as well as before and after the insurrection on the Capitol.
The first senior leaders of the Trump campaign heard about the documentary was Tuesday morning when the project was first reported by Politico, according to two former officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the group’s reaction.
The series, which has been titled Unprecedented, had been purchased by a streaming service and was scheduled to be released in three parts this summer, Mr Holder wrote.
The news of the footage also came as members of the committee held its fourth public hearing, this time focused on how Mr Trump’s relentless pressure to overturn the 2020 presidential election led to widespread threats against local election workers and state officials.
This week, @January6thCmte starts sharing evidence of the chilling inside plan to overturn the 2020 election and block the constitutional transfer of power. America will see footage and records we have documenting the dangerous extremist assault on our constitutional order.
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) June 7, 2022
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland, one of the members of the panel, told reporters on Tuesday afternoon that he had been contacted personally by a person who had knowledge of the footage and that is when the committee decided to issue its subpoena.
“I’ve not seen it yet but I know it exists,” Mr Raskin said.
The footage is the second time the committee will be leaning on documentary footage from that day to gather evidence for its sprawling, nearly year-long investigation. The first public hearing in early June featured testimony from Nick Quested, another British filmmaker, who was embedded with the Proud Boys in the weeks after Trump lost the 2020 election.
The statement from Mr Holder also stated that he will be going before the committee to provide testimony on Thursday.
