How & when to watch HBO’s new Republican-centric January 6 documentary

We’ve had plenty of documentaries about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, like Four Hours at the Capitol, January 6th, and the controversial The War on Truth, but Stopping The Steal is one of the more anticipated films about the attempted coup.

Dan Reed, the director of Stopping the Steal, is best known for his previous works The Truth vs. Alex Jones, which centered around Alex Jones’s oft-repeated lie that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax, and Leaving Neverland, which was about the sexual assault allegations against Michael Jackson. Reed’s new documentary will focus on the Jan 6 Capitol riots, in which large far-right Republican mobs stormed the Capitol building in retribution for Trump losing the presidency.

Stopping the Steal is set to release on September 17th, 2024 at 9:00 PM ET on HBO. You’ll be able to stream it starting then with a Max subscription.

This documentary aims to be a deep dive into one of the more shameful chapters of American history. It will feature testimonies from prominent Republicans, White House staff, and other once-powerful figures like former Pentagon Press Secretary Alyssa Farah Griffin and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr. Amos Pictures produced the film as an HBO original for HBO Max.

Here’s the full official synopsis:

Recounted in detail by former staff members of the Trump Administration, Republican political appointees, and elected state officials, STOPPING THE STEAL tracks the evolution of the movement to discredit the American election starting as early as July 2020 when the legitimacy of the election process began to be publicly questioned. Unfolding chronologically through to January 6, 2021, when an angry mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, the film explores the debunked claims of a stolen election including accusations of ballot tampering, alleged voting by illegal immigrants and deceased individuals, and hacking or malfunction of Dominion Voting Systems’ electronic ballot machines. As President Trump’s supporters pressure officials in Arizona and Georgia responsible for ratifying the count, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger recalls when he was told to find 11,000 additional votes for Trump, and Arizona Speaker of the House of Representatives Rusty Bowers describes getting a call from the White House urging him to further investigate the Maricopa County vote results despite any proof of malfeasance. STOPPING THE STEAL is a clear-eyed account of Republican officials who stood firmly by their principles often at great personal cost.

It can be difficult to understand just how and why so many people chose violence that day, but unfortunately, that’s the state of white supremacy in this country.