THE BIG SHOW — Congress editor Elana Schor talked over Slack with congressional reporters Kyle Cheney and Nicholas Wu about Thursday night’s prime-time Jan. 6 hearing:

As accustomed as congressional reporters are to juggling lots of news, we’re gearing up for a sprint to end all sprints. There will be as many as eight Jan. 6 committee hearings in the rest of June, starting with Thursday’s. If you could give readers one sentence of advice on how best to watch the hearings, what would it be?

NICHOLAS WU: You should read POLITICO and follow our coverage, but remember to take care of yourself throughout the whole process.

KYLE CHENEY: The committee’s singular purpose is to help connect their vast troves of information to everyday people who haven’t followed every twist and turn, so part of the metric of their success will be whether it doesn’t take work for viewers to understand why all of this matters.

The bottom line is, they want people at home to really feel how close our democracy came to collapse and that the threat is not over but ongoing, and arguably intensifying. So view it all through that lens.

I’ll let you get away with answering the question you wish I had asked — for two sentences — just this once. The committee is stocked with many different types of lawmakers, from nationally famous Trump critic Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), to the constitutional law professor and Trump impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), to the retiring centrist Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.). Who’s your pick for the sleeper player here, the possible breakout, and why?

CHENEY: I’d watch out for Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.). She’s one of the savviest members and best communicators that the committee has. She’s not always the chattiest with reporters, so you won’t see her making off-the-cuff comments a lot, but when she gets into gear, she can drive home important points more succinctly and powerfully than many of her colleagues. She showed this during the first impeachment of Donald Trump, and she worked as a lawmaker and staff on the only other impeachment inquiries in modern history.

WU: My pick for breakout star is Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.). He’s the kind of guy who’s a relatively under-the-radar House player but is poised to move higher in the chamber. He has been somewhat of a conduit between the committee and the rest of the Democratic caucus, and has taken on a highly visible role on the select panel.

As for a sleeper player? It’s not like we haven’t seen much of her before, especially as she’s taken on a role as a top Trump critic, but my vote would be for Cheney.

There’s talk of a final report from the committee by September, but as Hill folks, we know that Congress isn’t typically great at making its deadlines.

CHENEY: I think the deadline will stick — in part because I think the committee wants to tie another public hearing to the release of its report.

And because the report is expected to make policy proposals to address some of the threats to elections and to the security of the Capitol, the committee needs to release it on an early enough timetable for colleagues to act. The challenge for the committee has been deciding when to cut off the spigot of information that hasn’t stopped flowing. Documents from the National Archives are still flooding in, and the committee is engaged in numerous lawsuits that might unlock additional troves of evidence. So if there’s pressure to move the deadline, it’ll be because they’re still bringing in substantive information.

WU: Congressional deadlines are notoriously slippery, but the panel is going to run up against the clock with the House expected to flip in November’s elections. I’d expect them to stick to it. Kyle is absolutely right in noting they need time for Congress to try to act on any of their legislative proposals. There’s only a few legislative weeks in the House’s schedule after the November elections, after all, and Republicans are almost certainly going to halt the committee’s work once they take control of the House.

I was surprised to hear a friend who doesn’t follow politics too closely say she’s watching the first hearing on a date. Do you see these hearings breaking through as must-watch, Watergate-esque events for the general public?

WU: This is a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It’s important to remember that Richard Nixon didn’t resign from office until more than two years after the break-in at the DNC headquarters. We might not know the effects of this investigation for quite some time.

The media and political environment have certainly changed a lot in the 50 years since then, and I think it’s really hard to tell exactly how this is going to play with the American public. Polling shows that there are certainly other issues at top of mind for voters — gas prices, inflation, etc. — but the test for the panel is going to be to convince the public that they should care about and tune into this monthslong investigation.

CHENEY: The most important differentiator between these hearings and Watergate is the splintering of the media environment and the willingness of pro-Trump media outlets to bombard their audience with a counter-narrative — that Jan. 6 was not really that bad, that the investigation is a partisan sham, that those arrested are “political prisoners” — without ever really confronting the substance of what occurred.

The committee knows this is what they’re up against, and I think that’s part of the reason the committee is putting a ton of energy into stagecraft — not because it's something Congress should care about, but because they have no choice given the forces arrayed against them. I’d be surprised if this weren't the new normal for how high-profile reports are presented in the future.

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— Trump privately raised Jan. 6 Capitol appearance with Secret Service agent: As Trump left a rally with his supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, he appears to have held out hope until the last minute — even as chaos unfolded — that he’d be able to join them at the Capitol. Trump even raised the prospect privately with the head of his Secret Service detail at the time, Robert Engel, according to a person familiar with the agent’s congressional testimony. Engel told Jan. 6 select committee investigators that the two men discussed Trump’s desire to go to the Capitol and took different views on the topic. Engel noted that they went back to the White House instead of heading to Capitol Hill. The contents of Engel’s testimony have not been previously reported.

— Armed California man arrested near Justice Kavanaugh’s house: The Justice Department has charged California resident Nicholas Roske with attempted murder, alleging he appeared in Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Maryland neighborhood early this morning with a gun. Roske allegedly later told police during questioning that he was “upset” about a draft Supreme Court decision that would overturn precedent granting a federal constitutional right to abortion. POLITICO published the decision last month.

— With Roe likely to fall, California lawmakers move to enshrine it in constitution: The state could become the first to codify abortion rights in the state constitution if a Senate bill introduced today clears the Legislature before the end of the month. It would place a constitutional amendment on the November 2022 ballot asking voters to protect the right to an abortion and contraceptives.

— House Dems pass major gun safety bill that will wither in the Senate: The bill would raise the age for purchasing semi-automatic rifles from 18 to 21, ban high-capacity magazines, require a background check for buying a “ghost gun” and include safe storage requirements for firearms. The package is expected to go nowhere in the 50-50 Senate, where a bipartisan group of negotiators are trying to come up with their own agreement, but House Democrats wanted to force their Republican colleagues to go on the record on more sweeping gun safety policies.

— Senior Pence adviser to testify before Jan. 6 committee: Gregory Jacob will testify publicly before the Jan. 6 select committee on June 16 about his involvement in staving off a campaign by Trump and allies to pressure Pence to subvert the 2020 election. Jacob testified at length before the House’s Capitol riot investigators in February.

— DeSantis claims in-person learning saved Florida students: Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis spent much of the pandemic championing in-person education. But even as new nationwide research backs up Florida’s decision to steer students back to the classroom, the earliest test results from 2021-22 show a much more nuanced situation in the state’s public schools: One out of every four third graders scored the lowest mark possible on their state language arts assessments this year — marking the highest percentage since the test was introduced in 2015.

WHEN ELON MUSK ISN’T TWEETING — Christopher Miller, Bryan Bender and Mark Scott report from Ukraine’s Kharkiv region:

Every time Oleksiy and his fellow artillerymen hit a Russian target, they have one person to thank: Elon Musk, the world’s richest man.

Embedded in a frontline hot zone just south of the strategic town of Izyum in Ukraine’s war-ravaged east, Oleksiy — who declined to give his last name for security reasons — is now a power-user of Starlink, a satellite communication system owned by Musk’s SpaceX.

When planning a counterattack or artillery barrage, he dials up his superiors for last-minute orders via a rectangular white-and-gray Starlink satellite receiver concealed in a shallow pit in the garden of an abandoned cottage. The high-tech equipment is wired to a noisy generator that runs half of the day.

It’s not just about military communications. Others in Ukraine’s 93rd mechanized brigade let friends and family know they are safe through daily encrypted satellite messages after the local cellphone network was severed weeks ago during heavy shelling.

In their downtime, Oleksiy and his comrades keep tabs on the latest developments in the war via Starlink’s internet connection and — when there’s a lull between artillery duels — play Call of Duty on their smartphones while sheltering in bunkers and standing by for orders.

“Thank you, Elon Musk,” said Oleksiy soon after logging on through Starlink’s satellites to discover the Biden administration would be sending long-range rockets to the Ukrainian army in its fight with the Russians. “This is exactly what we need,” he added in reference to the rockets.

The United States, European Union and other NATO countries have donated billions of dollars in military equipment to Ukraine since the war began in late February. But Musk’s Starlink — based on a cluster of table-sized satellites flying as low as 130 miles above Ukraine and beaming down high-speed internet access — has become an unexpected lifeline to the country: both on the battlefield and in the war for public opinion.

‘PARIAH’ NO MORE? Just a year after concluding that Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader ordered the brutal murder of an American resident and journalist, and after winning the White House with a vow to make Riyadh a “pariah,” President Joe Biden is weighing travel to the kingdom next month as well as a meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. It’s a stunning reversal in the president’s treatment of a bilateral relationship that U.S. leaders have long struggled to use to their advantage at home, writes Andrew Desiderio.

Should Biden follow through with the high-level engagement, he can use the visit to address high gas prices and inflation at home by pushing the Saudis to help stabilize oil markets in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But as much as the White House might crave a turnaround in the Middle East after the disastrous exit from Afghanistan and stalled negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, meeting the crown prince would drive a wedge between Biden and Democratic lawmakers — and many see it as a betrayal by an administration that vowed to keep human rights at the center of its foreign policy.

“I just don’t see any evidence that Saudi Arabia is really stepping up or has stepped up in a situation like this to get relief to people who are just getting clobbered by the cost of gas,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has argued that Biden should have punished the crown prince more directly after declaring that he ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “And I see the human rights violations so clear and profound in terms of what they represent for our values.”

‘I DON’T WANT IT TO HAPPEN AGAIN’ — When the shooter arrived, Miah Cerrillo and her classmates hid behind their teacher’s desk and several backpacks.

The gunman shot Cerrillo’s teacher in the head, the Robb Elementary fourth-grader told a House oversight committee today. He shot some of Cerrillo’s classmates, including a friend who was hiding next to her. Cerrillo smeared blood on herself to hide from the shooter, she said via a video recording piped into the panel’s chambers. Then she grabbed her dead teacher’s phone and dialed 911, writes Juan Perez Jr.

“I don’t want it to happen again,” the Uvalde survivor said.

But as national security officials warned future domestic attacks could target schools, churches and public gatherings amid a point of high tension in American politics — and as an array of education organizations clamor for expanded federal gun safety laws — Senate Democrats acknowledge bipartisan negotiations will fall far short of what they want.

“I wish something would change, not only for our kids, but every single kid in the world because schools are not safe anymore,” Cerrillo’s father, Miguel, told committee members through tears before leaving the chamber today. “Something needs to really change.”