The hearing Thursday of the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol was the first of seven. In an interview with NJ Spotlight News, former New Jersey state Attorney General John Farmer said the aftermath of the attack was worse that the events of Jan. 6. “The aftermath [of Jan. 6] was worse because basically there’s an old saying that facts are stubborn things but what we’ve learned in the year and a half since is that so are lies. And what’s happened is there was an aggressive attempt to recalibrate the events so that it was just a minor scuffle or just regular political discourse or just tourists visiting the Capitol and unfortunately that narrative has caught on with enough people that I think this committee of January 6th is necessary to basically reestablish what really happened that day.”

Farmer, who served as a senior counsel to the 9/11 Commission and is a faculty member at the nonprofit Network Contagion Research Institute, which tracks deception, manipulation and hate across social media sites, said that based on the institute’s research, the Jan. 6 attack was not a surprise. “I guess the scale of it was probably a surprise, but the fact that there was violence and there was an attempt to subvert the election was not a surprise,” he said.