Over two hours, the 6 January committee chaired by Bennie Thompson outlined plans for subsequent hearings aimed at painting a full picture of the events of the Capitol riot in 2021.

Here are a few highlights from the evening's hearing.

• In his opening remarks, Bennie Thompson said that US democracy - and its Constitution - remains at risk from the same ideology that led to the riot.
• Liz Cheney accused former President Donald Trump of a sophisticated and far-reaching seven-part plan to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
• Video clips from Trump-era officials discussing his electoral loss were shown, in addition to pieces of interviews with daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner.
• The panel also heard testimony from documentarian Nick Quested, who filmed members of the Proud Boys, as well as Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards.
• While the hearing was given prime time coverage on several US networks, on conservative media outlets, the conversation was elsewhere. It remains to be seen whether the hearings will change the political conversation in America.

Our live coverage has now ended. You can follow updates to this story here.

This page was brought to you by Bernd Debusmann, Sam Cabral and Max Matza, with Boer Deng and Marianna Brady editing. Grace Conley, Jason Armesto, and Chloe Kim contributed.

Thursday's primetime special was the first of several public hearings planned by the 6 January committee.

We asked our panel of American voters what they learned from the hearing and if they plan to keep watching.

"I would have liked to see more of a visual timeline of events and more of Bill Barr and Ivanka's testimony.

I am still very pessimistic about changing anyone's mind. People are so polarised and stuck in their 'boxes'. I can't imagine this changing anything".

"I will be watching future hearings. I do believe this hearing has missed the mark on intentionality. The tone and basis of the questions need to be altered.

There needs to be more connection between the storming and its relationship to Trump, the intentions, the timeline, the planning".

"I don't think it was as hard-hitting as they would have liked, although the invoking of some very emotional material may have caught the attention of some Americans.

I will probably continue to watch. I want to see how this truly could've caused a coup or hurt our democracy. The committee needs to reformat though".

"It’s yet too early to tell if the hearings will change any minds out there. What I learned is how the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys planned the attack in advance and scouted the place before hand.

I would love to understand some key findings by the committee, so I will definitely watch again".

"Boring. In a nutshell, I have better things to do than waste my time watching [future hearings].

I didn't learn anything new and this hearing will not change anyone's minds. The only people watching it were partisan Democrats hoping to draw attention away from Biden and the Democrats' massive policy failures of the past 18 months that have our country in the pits".

As the prime time hearings were airing on US networks ABC, NBC and CBS, a parallel conversation was taking place on the conservative-leaning network Fox News, which did not air it.

The popular and controversial Fox News host Tucker Carlson dedicated his nightly programme to questioning the purpose of the 6 January committee.

“The point is not to get to the truth. It’s to hide the truth,” he said on Tucker Carlson Tonight. The show averages over three million nightly viewers and many agree that it has far reaching influence.

The host rejected the classification of the riot as an “insurrection”.

He argued that Democratic leaders were “talking about themselves non-stop” instead of focusing on “legitimate concerns” that faced by the American people.

"You might get an insurrection if you behave like that,” he warned.

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Former President Donald Trump has responded to tonight's committee hearing on his platform Truth Social.

"So the Unselect Committee of political HACKS refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements, refuses to talk of the Election Fraud and Irregularities that took place on a massive scale," he wrote.

"Our Country is in such trouble!"

The claim of election fraud has been central to Trump's political message after the 2020 vote he lost.

Image source, Screenshot.

The most evocative testimony of the evening came from Caroline Edwards, one of the Capitol police on the scene on 6 January who was injured on the day amid the stampede of rioters.

Watch her opening remarks, in which she discusses her pride at serving in uniform.

Miles Taylor, a former Trump administration Department of Homeland Security official and Joseph Moreno, a Democratic former federal prosecutor, have given us their views on today's hearing.

Taylor - who considers himself an ex-Republican - praised Cheney's "stinging indictment" of Trump's actions after the election.

In an anonymous op-ed published in The New York Times in September 2018, Taylor wrote of Trump's “amorality” and identified himself as part of a “quiet resistance” in the White House. He only later revealed himself in the run up to the 2020 election.

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Moreno says that it was "smart" for one of the Republicans on the committee to be chosen to deliver "an opening statement to a complex criminal conspiracy trial".

However, he found the evening's "strong start" gave way to "a meandering account of information," with a lack of focus that could cause viewers to drop off.

America's deepening political divide were laid bare by the Capitol riots last year.

We asked our panel of five Americans whether they think these hearings of the 6 January committee are important or damaging to the country:

"The hearing is good for the country and the whole world who believes in democratic governance. America needs to face the truth."

"Bad. It's one-sided. Just like the two impeachment trials were bad. All one-sided being pushed by the Democrats who had control of the House."

"Good in the long-term as I think it is necessary to know what happened to prevent it from happening again. Possibly bad in the short-term as it reopens old arguments."

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This was the first of several public hearings from the 6 January committee, and for some in the room, it was an emotional one.

During the committee hearing, family members of some of the officers who died during and after the riot were in tears while watching footage of the day.

The family members included Serena Liebengood - the widow of US Capitol Police officer Howie Liebengood, who took his own life days after the 6 January riot - and Sandra Garza, the widow of officer Brian Sicknick, who died after the attack.

Officer Sicknick's mother, Gladys Sicknick, was also present at the hearing.

Image source, Getty Images

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Following a video in which testimony from 6 January rioters was shown, committee chairman Bennie Thompson declared today's hearing over.

The hearings will resume on Monday.

The latter end of this evening's hearing featured Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards giving a harrowing account of being at the Capitol that day and confronting the rioters.

Edwards described how she watched an approaching crowd of rioters grow larger and eventually "turned the tables" on law enforcement.

The officers were pushed backwards by the crowd, Edwards testified. She said that amid the melee, she slipped on the concrete stairs, hit her head and blacked out.

The two panel members Cheney and Thompson thanked her for her bravery on the day, and the chairman has just closed out the hearing with footage of rioters themselves discussing their reasons for arriving at the Capitol that day.

Former Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller has taken to social media to say that a clip of him shown by the 6 January committee was incomplete and lacked context.

In footage of his deposition that was shown, Miller was heard saying that he told Trump "in pretty blunt terms, that he was going to lose" the election, according to their campaign data analyst.

On Twitter after the clip was played, Miller said that the committee failed to play the part of his testimony in which he said that "it's safe to say that [Trump] disagreed" with the conclusion because it was "looking at purely... what those numbers were showing, as opposed to broader things to include legality and election integrity".

Tara McKelvey
BBC News, Washington

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Several dozen people are gathered at a park near the US Capitol, watching footage of the riots on a big screen set up under trees.

The people in the crowd range in age and background, but they’re all transfixed by the melee that unfolded on the screen. One man stands stock still, holding a sign that says: “Jail Trump and His Repugnicons" [sic].

Another person at the watch party, a 33-year-old Democratic operative, Casey Prichard, says he was pleased to see Liz Cheney, a Republican, speak earlier.

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Nearly half of Republicans, according to polls, say they believe that the actions of those at the Capitol were patriotic, so Cheney's input makes a difference, he says.

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British filmmaker Nick Quested is the other witness testifying this evening.

Quested and his crew were following the far-right Proud Boys during the winter of 2020, and he has shared the exclusive footage with the 6 January committee.

In his opening statement, he said he personally "observed a large contingent of Proud Boys marching towards the Capitol building".

He was "surprised at the size of the group, the anger, the profanity" coming from the crowd, he said.

We checked in with our panel of five Americans as the 6 January committee played previously unseen footage of the attack. Here's what they said.

"Mike Pence stood up for the Constitution and followed The Electoral Count Act of 1887.

I hope the committee will address the security failures that led to this."

"I've lived in DC for most of my life and [have] taken many friends and family from out of town to walk around the Capitol building. This is very hard to watch."

Image source, Getty Images

US Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards has just given some of the most poignant testimony of the night with her opening remarks about her experience on and after the attack.

She was called "many names" after the 6 January riot, she began.

"I was called Nancy Pelosi's dog, " she said. "I was called a traitor. I was called a hero".

She was none of these, she continued - but simply, "an American standing face-to-face with other Americans asking myself how we had gotten here".

Edwards was among the first police officers injured in the riot.

Since 6 January, her injuries have prevented her from returning to her previous duties as a member of the Capitol Police first responder unit, according to the committee.

Before the break, the committee has just aired a video of an interview of Trump claiming that the riot was a showcase of "love", played over chaotic scenes around the Capitol.

Even with the 6 January committee hearing underway, Republican lawmakers are tweeting about other issues and squarely taking aim at the administration of Joe Biden.

Tennessee Senator Bill Hagerty was writing about high petrol prices, calling them "a direct result of Biden’s anti-American energy policies".

Meanwhile, Tennessee's other senator, Marsha Blackburn, was taking aim at the administration's so-called "disinformation board" - a group aimed at combating foreign misinformation but criticised by conservatives as a government body to stifle free speech.

Texas Republican Ted Cruz was tweeting about a pending Supreme Court case revolving around religious freedom.

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Tonight's hearing is a mix of live and pre-produced content, with two eye witnesses to the riot now being sworn in to testify before the committee.

US Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury during the attack, will describe what she saw on the premises.

Edwards is credited with preventing several protesters from entering the building in spite of her injuries. She is yet to be physically cleared to return to work.

Nick Quested, a British filmmaker and Academy Award nominee, will discuss footage he shot on the day and in the days leading up to the siege.

The Londoner and a documentary crew from his Goldcrest Films company interacted with the leaders of two far-right groups: Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys and Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers. Tarrio and Rhodes have both been charged with seditious conspiracy - a Civil War-era charge that carries up to 20 years in prison - over their alleged roles in the attack.

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In the first hour of the hearing, we've heard from committee chairman Bennie Thompson and from Liz Cheney, both of whom laid out the committee's plans and their allegations that former President Trump was at the "centre" of a coordinated, sophisticated effort to subvert the 2020 elections.

Additionally, the committee unveiled never-before-seen footage of the riot, including chaotic images in and around the Capitol on 6 January.

The committee also showed bits of video clips with testimony from Trump's daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.

Image source, Getty Images

Never-before-seen footage of members of the Proud Boys at the Capitol riot has just been played at the hearing.

The explicit video is interspersed with footage of the scenes leading up to the attack, including Trump's speech near the Capitol grounds and the certification of the 2020 election results by members of Congress that as happening that day.

In Trump's speech, he pressures his vice-president, Mike Pence, to refuse to certify the election results.

A tweet in which Trump pointedly criticises Pence for failing to do so is played over video of rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence".