Our live coverage from the seventh public hearing of the Capitol riot committee has come to a close.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Committee vice-chair Liz Cheney alleged that the hearings have forced allies of Donald Trump into presenting him as "an impressionable child" swayed by "crazies" - when, in fact, he knew and chose to ignore the fact allegations of voter fraud were not backed by evidence
• A Trump tweet on 19 December 2020 that introduced the idea of a "wild" rally at the US Capitol was a call to action to right-wing extremists "spoiling for a fight", the panel claimed
• New testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone filled in the details of an "unhinged" December meeting between Trump and advisers who pushed conspiracy theories about the election; the meeting escalated into a shouting match after Cipollone and others asked them to prove their claims
• Cipollone also testified that members of the president's staff knew there was no evidence of election fraud and believed he should concede
• Footage and private communications shown by the committee detailed closer ties between top Trump allies and far-right extremists than previously known
• Riot participant Stephen Ayres testified at the hearing that Trump "got everybody riled up" at his rally, then "we basically just followed what he said" and marched to the Capitol

Follow updates to this story here.

This live page was brought to you by Sam Cabral, Bernd Debusmann, Nadine Yousif - with Gareth Evans editing.

Image source, Getty Images

Once the committee ends its public hearings, many expect that the Department of Justice (DOJ) will take up the legislative mantle and prosecute those responsible for planning and promoting the Capitol attack.

Susan Corke, director at the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project, says the committee has forged "a blueprint" to do just that.

The Intelligence Project has provided testimony to the Committee, and it's also closely tracked the activities of far-right groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

Speaking to the BBC's The Context programme, Corke said Tuesday's hearing had “provided the public with very clear links” between the Trump campaign, Trump’s tweets, and the riot.

"I think it could be reasonably assumed that he understood that by calling people to DC - and knowing they had weapons - that it was a call to violence," she said. "I certainly don't think it's something [the DOJ] can ignore."

"I've heard the criticism that the Department of Justice is not moving quickly enough, but I would note that this is a very complex case," she added. "The committee did an excellent job of showing the steps that led up to January 6."

Tara McKelvey
In the hearing room

Image source, Getty Images

Stephen Ayres, a former Trump supporter who pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct for his actions on 6 January, stunned people in the hearing room when he approached two of the officers who were injured in the riot.

One of the officers, Harry Dunn, described their exchange. “It wasn’t a hug,” Dunn tells me. “He touched my shoulder. He apologised.”

Dunn shook his head several times and looked uncertain, if not downright sceptical. “I’m trying to process it,” he says.

For Ayres, the effort to make amends seemed to be a heartfelt gesture and a step towards healing.

For Dunn, the outpouring of emotion was a surprise, and perhaps not one that was entirely welcome, at least in that moment.

Barbara Plett Usher
in Washington

Witness - and former Trump supporter - Stephen Ayres told the committee he left the Capitol riot when the president finally posted a tweet asking his supporters to go home.

I saw the impact of that tweet myself on the day.

I was standing on a low wall in front of the Capitol building next to a young man in combat fatigues who was broadcasting Trump's video message to the crowd on a megaphone.

When it finished he shouted into the megaphone: "You heard him! Trump is your commander in chief! He says go home! So Go Home!"

Mike Wendling
BBC anti-disinformation unit

Image source, Getty Images

Today’s hearing also highlighted the key role of a group of ultra-nationalists known as the Proud Boys.

Formed in 2016 by Canadian-British far-right activist Gavin McInnes, they bill themselves as a fraternal organisation. But that description leaves out the group’s rather crucial role in American political violence.

From their inception, Proud Boys regularly went to battle against far-left antifa activists in cities including Portland, Berkeley and New York.

They’re pro-gun, anti-immigration and the “Boys” is literal – no women need apply.

After McInnes stepped down, the group was led by Enrique Tarrio, a businessman and former law enforcement informant from Florida.

Tarrio wasn’t at the 6 January riot, having been arrested two days earlier for burning a Black Lives Matter banner taken from a church. But the Proud Boys were out in force on the day, and Mr Tarrio and four other Proud Boys have been charged with seditious conspiracy.

The hearing has now ended.

In closing, today's lead questioner Jamie Raskin says the committee has revealed that Donald Trump's true legacy is "American carnage".

"The Watergate break-in was like a cub scout meeting compared to these events," he adds.

Committee vice-chair Liz Cheney says the final hearings next week will reveal how - as the attack on the Capitol was under way - Trump did not use the power at his disposal to call off the mob of rioters.

She adds that a witness, who she did not name and who is yet to speak at the hearings, had been contacted by Trump.

"This committee has supplied that information to the Justice Department," says Cheney, who has raised concerns of witness tampering over the course of the hearings.

“We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.”

Anthony Zurcher
North America reporter

It’s been a central argument of the 6 January committee that Donald Trump knowingly set the stage for the violence when he told his supporters to march to the Capitol and that his silence as it unfolded help the situation to spiral out of control.

In Tuesday’s hearing, the committee presented evidence on both counts. Committee member Stephanie Murphy explained that Trump ad-libbed key lines in his 6 January speech at a rally near the White House. He added specific condemnations of Vice-President Mike Pence and told his supporters to be strong, to fight like hell and to march to the Capitol. That last part was not in his scripted speech, but the committee showed text indicating rally-goers, including militants, knew he was going to say that days in advance.

Trump’s speech, Democratic Representative Stephanie Murphy said, was “built on a foundation of lies”.

“He lied to his supporters that the election was stolen,” the congresswoman from Florida continued. “He stoked their anger. He called for them to fight for him. He directed them to the US Capitol. He told them he would join them. And his supporters believed him and many headed towards the Capitol. As a result, people died, people were injured, many of his supporters’ lives will never be the same.”

One of those supporters was a man named Stephen Ayers, who testified to the committee that he entered the Capitol because Trump told him to and only exited because Trump, after hours of violence, told his supporters to leave.

If he had spoken out earlier, he said, “maybe we wouldn’t be in this bad of a situation”.

Chairman Bennie Thompson says today's live witnesses exemplify the crowd that rioted at the Capitol on 6 January: "Both far-right extremists and ordinary Trump supporters swept up in the madness."

Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the Oath Keepers, describes the group as violent, dismissive of the rule of law, and capable of swaying people through lies and deceit.

He says the group - which he left before the Capitol attack - viewed themselves as a paramilitary outfit.

"We got exceedingly lucky that we did not have more bloodshed," Tatenhove testifies.

Stephen Ayres, who was charged with disorderly conduct for entering the Capitol, calls himself "a family man" who fell "hardcore into social media" and grew upset over Donald Trump's false claims of a stolen election.

"I felt like I needed to be down here," he says, adding that "everybody" around him believed the president would join them in their march to the Capitol.

After Trump "riled" people up with his rally speech, Ayres says: "We basically just followed what he said."

The committee hears that Ayres - who lost his job and sold his home after his arrest - no longer supports Trump or believes the election was stolen, and is "mad" the ex-president continues to lie.

Image source, Getty Images

The Oath Keepers, one of the extremist groups that participated in the 6 January riot, are a far-right, extremist organisation founded in 2009 by Stewart Rhodes, a Harvard-educated lawyer and former US Army paratrooper.

The US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has characterised the group as "a large but loosely organised collection of right-wing anti-government extremists" united in the belief that the US government has been "co-opted by a shadowy conspiracy that is trying to strip American citizens of their rights".

The group is believed to largely focus on former members of the US military and ex-police officers. While the organisation has existed for years, it became particularly prominent in 2020 when it repeatedly clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters in various parts of the country.

"While there is a formal national leadership, on the local level many Oath Keepers are essentially self‐organised, and form official, semi‐official or informal groupings of Oath Keepers," the ADL notes on its website.

In January, Rhodes was among 11 people charged with seditious conspiracy in relation to the 6 January riot.

The committee has revealed evidence it claims ties those close to ex-President Trump with those who stormed the Capitol.

Photos show members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia apparently on the security details of, or accompanying, Trump advisers Michael Flynn and Roger Stone.

Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes is shown calling publicly for the president to institute martial law, and for members of the group to protest in their state capitals if they could not come to Washington.

And in a private communication, rally organiser Ali Alexander says: "Trump is supposed to order us to the Capitol at the end of his speech."

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is shown the day prior to the attack, telling listeners on his show to "strap in" because "all hell is going to break loose tomorrow".

Trump spoke with Bannon twice on the day of the riots, White House logs shown by the committee reveal.

Tara McKelvey
In the hearing room

Image source, GET

On a day focused on violent extremism, people in the hearing room, many of whom were at the Capitol on 6 January, listened with solemn expressions.

Threatening messages flashed on a screen as part of the hearing - some calling for blood.

Officers in the back of the room had stony faces, and one woman crossed her arms tightly and leaned back as if to protect herself.

For many here, memories of the siege are recent and searing.

Here's some of what we've learned in the first hour of testimony:

• Liz Cheney, the vice-chairwoman of the committee, said former president Trump was repeatedly told that allegations of voter fraud were unfounded. "Millions of Americans were persuaded to believe what Trump and his advisers did not," she said
• Jamie Raskin, who is leading today's questioning, said the committee had been told of an "unhinged" meeting shortly after the election where Trump drafted an executive order to seize election machines. When that idea was rejected, Trump floated having a large gathering on 6 January
• Stephanie Murphy, co-lead of the hearing, said a 19 December Trump tweet urging supporters to gather in Washington served as a call to action
• The committee then heard pre-recorded testimony from Pat Cipollone. The former White House counsel under Trump said the president's staff knew there was no evidence of election fraud and they believed Trump should have conceded

Anthony Zurcher
North America reporter

Image source, Getty Images

The members of the 6 January committee are facing the same challenge House impeachment managers confronted in Donald Trump’s February 2021 impeachment trial. How do they draw a conclusive line between the former president and the rioters who breached the Capitol?

Back then, the House managers cited Trump’s overheated rhetoric at the rally near the White House earlier that day. They pointed to his months-long efforts to undermine the 2020 election results and to stir up his base’s anger about the results.

They detailed his apparent inaction as the attack was unfolding, culminating with the video in which he told his supporters to go home, but added “we love you; you’re very special” and the ominous tweet warning that “these are the things and events that happen” when “great patriots” have been treated badly and unfairly.

The 6 January committee has added to this record, revealing that members of the president’s inner circle were concerned about the potential for violence days before the Capitol was breached.

In her headline-grabbing testimony, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchison recounted how Trump knew some of his supporters on 6 January were armed and equipped with military gear – and didn’t care.

Not caring about the potential for violence, however, is different than being directly engaged in its planning or execution, at least when it comes to criminal culpability. And while the 6 January committee may still be gathering evidence, there has been no proof of the latter so far.

The committee is attempting to draw a direct line between a Donald Trump tweet from December 2020 in which he called, for the first time, for a rally to coincide with the day Congress would meet to certify the election results.

"Be there, will be wild," it read.

Committee member Jamie Raskin notes that one rally organiser would soon register the website domain wildprotest.com as part of his planning efforts.

Prominent right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is seen on video rallying supporters that "the time for games is over, the time for action is now".

Another right-wing personality says the rally on 6 January will be a "red wedding" - a pop culture reference to a scene of mass slaughter in HBO's Game of Thrones drama.

The committee has just returned from a brief recess.

It is now expected to turn its attention to the actions of extremist groups in the days leading up to, and on, the day of the Capitol riot.

The panel will hear from Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the far-right Oath Keepers.

The group's leader Stewart Rhodes and 10 other members have been charged with seditious conspiracy - a US civil war-era charge that carries up to 20 years in prison - over their roles in the Capitol attack.

Also testifying today will be Stephen Ayres, a Trump supporter from Warren, Ohio who pleaded guilty last month to disorderly and disruptive conduct for entering the Capitol that day.

Barbara Plett Usher
in Washington

The description of a "surprise, unhinged" meeting at the White House on 18 December is just the latest window into the chaos in Trump’s post-election orbit revealed by these hearings.

Last week, we heard about Trump throwing his lunch against the wall and a White House aide wiping up the dripping ketchup.

Today we heard about a screaming match between Trump’s White House advisors and some of his personal lawyers who’d managed to get into the Oval Office and were proposing outlandish schemes to “prove” election fraud.

"They were attacking me verbally and I was just asking a simple question, where is the evidence?" said Pat Cipollone.

“There were people shouting at each other, hurling insults at each other,” said Derek Lyons, former White House staff secretary, “not just people sitting on a couch chit chatting.”

Pat Cipollone's testimony is filling in the details of a meeting in mid-December 2020, in which ex-President Trump discussed strategies to overturn the election.

In the Oval Office with Trump were informal advisers pushing unfounded theories about a stolen election, he says.

Cipollone and another White House counsel Eric Herschmann interrupted the meeting and joined the discussion in order to push the trio to provide evidence for their claims.

They "forcefully [attacked] me verbally", Cipollone says.

Tara McKelvey
in the hearing room

When the subject of Patrick Byrne, a former CEO of Overstock.com, comes up, one woman, dressed in a pink scarf and holding a notebook in the back of the hearing room, shakes her head in dismay: “Mm-hmm,” she mutters disapprovingly.

Like others in the hearing room, she believes it was unwise for Trump to be meeting with Byrne, a controversial figure who had a romantic relationship with a woman accused of being a Russian spy.

And when a former White House lawyer said on videotape that he was appalled to see Byrne in the Oval Office, recalling how he asked Byrne: “Who are you?”, the woman listening to his testimony and several others in the back of the room laughed outright.

The story of the president’s actions, at least in this version, is so outlandish, they seemed to say, all they could do is laugh.

In a series of Twitter posts as the hearing began, the Republicans in the US House of Representatives repeatedly criticised the work of the committee, characterising it as a political "witch-hunt".

In one post, the House Republicans linked to a CNN video showing interviews with US voters, along with the caption: "The American people are not concerned with [Democratic House] Speaker Pelosi's illegitimate political witch-hunt."

"They see it for what it truly is," the post added. "A distraction".

A second post referred to the committee as a "kangaroo court".

Another tweet, posted earlier on Tuesday, noted that session leader Jamie Raskin had previously objected to certifying the results of the 2016 election that saw Donald Trump come to power.

Over the past few minutes, we've heard snippets from ex-White House counsel Pat Cipollone's video testimony to the committee.

Cipollone discusses a plan - which had by December 2020 been drafted into a presidential executive order - to seize voting machines.

The executive order would also have authorised Trump lawyer Sidney Powell as a special counsel to oversee the process.

Cipollone says he was "vehemently opposed" to the move, adding it was "not how we do things in the United States".

He adds that Powell and others were pushing conspiracy theories about the election but providing no evidence. "At some point, you have to put up or shut up," he says.