After 11 months of work, the congressional committee investigating the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol - and the events leading up to it - held its first public hearing to announce their findings.
It was an unprecedented evening affair. Even Watergate, which may have set the benchmark for modern high-profile and politically potent congressional hearings, conducted all their work during the day.
Democrats - and the two Republicans - on the committee insisted that it was important to present their work before a large American audience, both for history's sake and to set up legislative action to protect US democracy from future attacks.
The rest of the Republican Party, on the other hand, viewed the proceedings as a partisan show trial, one-sided and illegitimate.
With the three major networks, as well as every major cable news channel except Fox News, broadcasting the Thursday hearing in its entirety, the American public will have ample opportunity to make their own judgement.
A case against Donald Trump
If there were a question as to whether committee chairman Bennie Thompson holds Donald Trump personally responsible for the attack on the US Capitol, he put that to rest early in his opening statement. The then-president, he said, "was trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power".
"Donald Trump was at the centre of this conspiracy," he added.
Those are strong words. Now the committee has to present evidence to back that up.
It raises the question of whether, if this is what Mr Thompson and others truly believe, the committee will recommend that the former president himself be charged with a crime.
Within minutes of Thursday night's opening hearing, the chairman essentially accused Mr Trump of committing one.
Baseless election allegations
Before the 6 January committee can prove that Mr Trump intentionally subverted the peaceful and proper transfer of power to Joe Biden, it had to prove that the then-president was knowingly spreading false information.
To do so, committee vice-chair Liz Cheney didn't try to refute all the specific claims the president and his supporters have advanced. Instead she simply recounted and played video testimony of the president's own advisers confirming that the election results were valid.
In one key clip, Bill Barr - the president's attorney general - recounted how he used a dismissive expletive to tell the president that his claims of widespread election fraud were baseless.
She was, in effect, damning the former president with his own team's words.
While the allegations she made were serious, the words bogged down in lengthy paragraphs, numbered lists and "we will show you" expository statements.
It wasn't until the committee ran an extended video of the attack - comprised largely of security and police body camera footage, interspersed with Trump's speech excerpts and tweets - that the drama of the day's events became visceral, not cerebral.