Jan. 6 committee announces next hearing will be held Oct. 13

WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol announced Thursday that it's holding its next hearing on Oct. 13.

The panel had postponed a public hearing it had scheduled last week because Hurricane Ian was set to make landfall on Florida’s Gulf Coast. The hearing next Thursday is set to begin at 1 p.m. ET.

Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said that the hearing's format would diverge from the one used during their series of hearings over the summer so that each of the nine lawmakers will have a chance to speak.

Members haven’t explicitly said the next hearing will be their last. It will be held with less than a month before the midterm elections on Nov. 8.

The panel still needs to produce a written report on their findings over the past 14 months. But with the Justice Department now ramping up its criminal investigation into the Jan. 6 riot, the committee’s relevance has begun to fade, one of its members told NBC News.

It's unclear what the next hearing will focus on, however, there have been several developments since the committee's last hearing in July. The panel recently interviewed Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

The rescheduled session could feature video of testimony from some other members of former President Donald Trump's administration, including Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who both have spoken to the committee but have not appeared in any of the hearings.

The last set of hearings held in June and July featured wide-ranging testimony from former Trump staffers as well as new video footage from the day of the riot.

Among the interviewees prominently featured were White House counsel Pat Cipollone and Cassidy Hutchinson, who was a senior aide to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. In bombshell testimony, Hutchinson detailed outbursts she said Trump made on Jan. 6.

The most recent hearing in late July focused on what happened inside the White House during the 187 minutes between Trump's speech and his tweet encouraging rioters to head home.