Why the first Jan. 6 committee hearing doesn't bode well for Trump

On Thursday night, in a live prime-time hearing, the House Jan. 6 committee finally began to lay out the findings of its 11-month investigation in public. The stakes were high, as was the bar that the committee’s own members set for the sort of explosive evidence that would be on display. And over the course of two hours, those expectations were surpassed.

The path forward promises to clearly link former President Donald Trump with the insurrection that nearly managed to keep him in office.

For a recap of the first Jan. 6 committee hearing, check out MSNBC's expert analysis here: msnbc.com/jan6hearings.

Among the highlights were Chairman Bennie Thompson and ranking member Liz Cheney’s laying out the course of the hearings over the next month. We’ll be shown more videos from the hundreds of hours of depositions that the committee has taken, demonstrating that Trump’s team knew he lost.

We’ll be shown how deep the plots to pressure Vice President Mike Pence and state legislatures to reject Joe Biden’s victory went. And we’ll hear new details about how the Jan. 6 meeting in Congress was targeted as the key moment in the plot to reverse the election’s results.

What’s more, we’ll see firsthand how people around Trump knew what he was doing was wrong — and how he ignored every single one of them.

There’s a lot of speculation about whether the hearings will change anyone’s minds or maybe spur the Justice Department to finally act against Trump. What’s clear already, though, is that these hearings, like Trump tweeted ahead of Jan. 6, “will be wild.”