Meet 11 key people behind the January 6 congressional investigation that starts revealing its findings today

Rep. Bennie Thompson has spent three decades in Congress and risen to become chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.

In a recent interview, the Mississippi Democrat told Insider that his leadership of the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol stands out as the most significant work of his time in public office.

"There's a lot of other pieces of legislation that basically alter the trajectory of so many people in my district, in this country, as well as other pieces of legislation, but nothing compares to the importance of this," he said.

Thompson also told Insider that his committee is not ruling out the possibility of holding more hearings after the six in June.

"If there is something we think that's of value that a hearing could amplify, we are absolutely open to doing it," he said in an Insider interview. "It's our democracy that stands to lose if we don't get it right."

She is not the committee's chair, but in many ways, Rep. Liz Cheney has emerged as the face of the House panel investigating the January 6 attack.

As one of just two Republicans on the committee, Cheney has established herself as the fiercest critic of former President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill. And while other top Republicans have only vaguely alluded to Trump eventually facing consequences from the Capitol attack, Cheney has gotten specific in public remarks.

In December, she appeared to directly address Trump's potential criminal culpability when she called attention to a federal statute making it illegal to obstruct an official proceeding. As the House panel took steps to hold former White House chief of staff in contempt, she said: "Mr. Meadows' testimony will bear on a key question in front of this Committee: Did Donald Trump, through action or inaction, corruptly seek to obstruct or impede Congress's official proceeding to count electoral votes?"

In those remarks, legal experts saw a clear reference to a charge the Justice Department has brought about numerous accused Capitol rioters.

More recently, ahead of the House committee's first public hearing, Cheney described the Capitol attack as part of an "extremely well-organized" conspiracy.

"It's really chilling," Cheney said during an appearance on CBS "Sunday Morning." "I have not learned anything that has made me less concerned," she added.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California serves as the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Schiff was in the spotlight once before for going after Trump and his associates during the former president's first impeachment trial, which focused on his role in leveraging approved US military aid to Ukraine to press its leaders to announce an investigation into the Bidens.

This time Schiff will help make a different case to the American public — by exposing what really happened during the January 6 insurrection and how it unfolded.

"Our goal is to present the narrative of what happened in this country, how close we came to losing our democracy, what led to the violence," Schiff told CBS News earlier this week. "Americans I think, know a great deal already — they have seen a number of bombshells already [and] there's a great deal they haven't seen. But perhaps the most important is the public has not seen it woven together, how one thing led to another."

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland has extensive experience investigating the events of the January 6 insurrection.

Last year, Raskin was the House's lead manager in Trump's second impeachment trial.

Raskin, a constitutional law professor, tried to make the case that Trump was directly responsible for the January 6 insurrection. Even though those efforts ultimately failed, the committee will still be relying on his knowledge and expertise.

Raskin told Insider in a recent interview that there is no justification for Republicans to refuse to cooperate with the committee's investigation.

"It's shocking to me that members of Congress would not want to participate," Raskin, who is a member of the House select committee, told Insider in the May interview. "They have an opportunity to plead the Fifth Amendment if they think something they might say would incriminate themselves."

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California has served in Congress for over two decades.

Lofgren, a former law professor, serves on the House Judiciary Committee and the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.

Lofgren brings extensive experience in congressional hearings and legal affairs to the committee. She is the only sitting member of Congress to have worked on four presidential impeachment trials.

Lofgren previously told PBS that what occurred on January 6 at the US Capitol was more serious than the Watergate scandal.

"What has unfolded here, I think, is more serious than the threat that was posed by Watergate to our country," she said.

Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat and former Navy commander, highlighted her "two decades in uniform" when she joined the House committee investigating January 6.

"We have to get to the bottom of this, and this can't be a partisan thing," she said.

On the committee, she has forcefully criticized the Justice Department for not moving more quickly to bring contempt of Congress charges against Trump allies who have refused to comply with subpoenas from the House panel.

At a hearing in late March, she voiced frustration with the Justice Department not yet acting on the committee's referrals recommending contempt charges against former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and other onetime Trump advisors, including Peter Navarro and Dan Scavino. (Navarro was charged with contempt of Congress and is set to appear in federal court on June 17.)

"Attorney General Garland, do your job so we can do ours," Luria said at the March hearing.

On January 6, 2021, Rep. Pete Aguilar was on the House floor as the pro-Trump mob advanced on the Capitol and watched as Speaker Nancy Pelosi was rushed out of the chamber.

Aguilar, a California Democrat, told Insider last year that he brought a book with him that day to take notes. At 2:34 pm that afternoon, Aguilar said, he wrote: "I'm a little scared."

More than a year later, Aguilar is among the seven Democrats on the nine-member House panel investigating the Capitol attack. At the one-year anniversary of the attack, Aguilar forecast that the panel would "clearly articulate" a case to the American public.

Aguilar has also defended the committee's efforts to question House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy about his communications with Trump.

Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida has extensive experience in national security. Prior to being elected into office, she served as a national security specialist in the office of the defense secretary.

She currently serves on the House Ways and Means Committee and House Armed Services Committee.

Axios reported that Murphy is pushing for legislation that would improve coordination efforts among federal agencies that focus on national security and intelligence, as part of the legislative recommendations the committee will make once the public hearings are over.

As fellow Republican lawmakers openly resisted the January 6 inquiry, Rep. Kinzinger joined with Cheney to break ranks and serve on the panel investigating the Capitol attack.

The Illinois Republican paid a price for that decision. Scorned by his party, Kinzinger chose not to run for reelection this year but has hinted at a potential presidential campaign, telling HuffPost in a recent interview that he would "love" to face Trump.

Kinzinger has used his platform to call out fellow Republicans for downplaying the Capitol attack.

"This is a moment where every Republican — I don't care if you're running for city council all the way up to Congress, Senate, etc. — every Republican has to be clear and forceful on the record: Do they think January 6th was legitimate political discourse?" he said in an interview with CBS's "Face the Nation."

Timothy Heaphy joined the House committee investigating January 6 in August, with Rep. Bennie Thompson declaring that the move was "good news" not only for the congressional panel but also "for the American people."

Heaphy served in the Obama administration as the Senate-confirmed US attorney in western Virginia. Later, as a partner at the law firm Hunton Andrews Kurth, he conducted an independent review of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where white supremacists clashed with counter-demonstrators in August 2017.

An alumnus of the University of Virginia, Heaphy was serving as the university's top lawyer when he accepted the chief counsel role with the January 6 committee. He took a leave of absence from the university upon joining the congressional panel.

But in January, Virginia's newly elected Republican attorney general, Jason S. Miyares, fired him. Miyares denied that the decision was related to Heaphy's role in the January 6 investigation, but Democrats accused him of taking the unusual move to further Trump's efforts to undermine the congressional inquiry.

John Wood joined the House January 6 committee in October as counsel to the panel's Republican vice-chair, Rep. Liz Cheney.

Wood was previously the general counsel of the US Chamber of Commerce. In the Bush administration, he served as the US attorney in western Missouri and as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.

Before those roles, Wood clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife, Ginni Thomas, has come under scrutiny from the House committee for her role in helping Trump attempt to reverse the 2020 election. In the course of its months-long investigation, the House committee has obtained text messages Ginni Thomas sent to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in which she encouraged him to continue contesting the election results.

The revelation of the text messages fueled ethics questions around Justice Thomas, who stood out in January as the only justice to dissent when the Supreme Court rejected Trump's bid to block the release of some presidential records to the House committee investigating the Capitol attack. Some Democrats called for his impeachment.

Wood previously clerked for retired Judge Michael Luttig, who has his own connection to January 6. In the days before January 6, he urged then-Vice President Mike Pence to resist pressure from Trump to take steps to try to delay or even block the congressional certification of Joe Biden's victory.