A day after the last mutineer left the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, President Donald Trump’s advisers urged him to address the nation to condemn the violence, hold accountable those who had assaulted it. the halls of Congress and declare the 2020 Elections to decide.
He struggled to do so. In the course of an hour of trying to record the message, Trump refused to hold the rebels accountable, trying to call them patriots, and refused to say the election was over, according to people familiar with the work of the House committee investigating January. 6 attack.
The audience could see the results of that recording for the first time Thursday night, when the committee plans to offer a bold conclusion at its eighth hearing: Trump not only did nothing despite repeated pleas from top aides to help put end to violence, but sat down. coming back and enjoying watching it. He reluctantly condemned it – in a three-minute speech on the evening of January 7 – only after efforts to annul the 2020 election had failed and after his attendees told him that members of his own cabinet they were discussing invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
“That’s what I wanted to happen,” said Elaine Luria (D-Va.), Who is scheduled to lead the interrogation Thursday along with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), In an interview this week. . “You may have said before,‘ Was he incompetent? Was it someone who freezes at a time when they can’t react to something? Or was that exactly what he wanted to happen? And after all that, I am convinced that this is exactly what he wanted to happen.
On Wednesday, committee aides christened the presentation at prime time as a “187-minute hearing,” a reference to the period between Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6 before protesters marched on the Capitol. and his late-afternoon statements from Rose Garden asking the mutineers to go home. The hearing will focus heavily on Trump’s inaction in the White House during that time, aides said in a call with reporters.
BLOOD VERSION: For a terrifying 187 minutes, the president saw his supporters attack the Capitol and resisted pleas to stop them.
“The president did not tell his supporters to leave the Capitol and go home until 16:17,” said one of the aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly. “We’re going to remind people that there was this inaction in the White House.”
The hearing, whose chairman, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), Will attend remotely because of his recent diagnosis of covid, is expected to arrive in just under two hours, he said. ‘assistant.
The audience is also expected to unite details from previous hearings, including the incendiary presidential rhetoric that drew thousands to Washington that day, Trump’s willingness to grant audiences to marginal figures who market fabulist and unconstitutional theories about how he could maintain the presidency and he was often urged to intervene during the violence, but refused to do so.
All of this points to a conclusion, which the committee plans to argue Thursday: Trump wanted violence, is responsible for it, and his unwillingness to help end it amounts to a lack of duty and a violation of his oath of office.
“It’s very clear that seeing this violence was part of the plan,” Luria said. “I wanted to see it develop. And it wasn’t until he realized he wouldn’t succeed that he finally got up and said something.”
A Trump spokesman described the Jan. 6 investigation as a “distraction” from the Democrats’ “failures.”
“November is approaching, and all Democrats will have to prove that their short term with a majority in Congress is another investigation nowhere, as the world burned,” Trump spokeswoman Taylor Budowich said.
On Tuesday, the former president posted on the social media platform Truth Social that the committee, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, “is a fraud and a disgrace to the United States. Without due process, neither the interrogations, nor the opposing witnesses, nothing! “
In the January 7 prerecorded speech finally released by the White House, Trump accused that “protesters who infiltrated the Capitol have desecrated the seat of American democracy.” He added that those who had broken the law would “pay”.
But more recently, he has spoken out on behalf of detainees for involvement in the riots, lamenting the “horrific persecution of political prisoners.”
Two live witnesses are expected for Thursday’s hearing: former Undersecretary of Press Sarah Matthews and former National Security Deputy Adviser Matthew Pottinger. They both resigned following the events of January 6, and both are expected to explain why. In addition, Matthews is expected to provide details of what he saw on the west wing that day, including whether Trump knew violence had erupted when he attacked his vice president, Mike Pence, in a tweet at 2:24 p.m. .
Pence, as president of the Senate, rejected Trump’s demands to reject the ballot count that day, arguing that he was not empowered to do anything but accept the votes of state-appointed voters.
Trump’s election escalated tensions and put the U.S. on track until Jan. 6, according to the panel
The committee will also show new clips of recorded testimonies from Pat Cipollone, the former White House lawyer who made his first recorded appearance at last week’s hearing. Cipollone is expected to show up by saying he was among White House aides who backtracked vigorously against unfounded theories of election fraud.
The committee plans to reproduce Cipollone’s recorded testimony describing his thoughts on Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6, as well as his dismay at Trump’s recorded statement after the violence had begun to subside. In these comments, the president refused to read the prepared comments, but instead told the rioters, after urging them to return home, “We love you. You are very special.”
The committee is expected to show some of the pleas in which it was asked to act and for witnesses to describe others, said people familiar with the matter.
The committee also plans to reveal that an important period of time passed from the time the aides were instructed to set up a camera and microphone for these observations to the time Trump actually spoke. The hearing will explore what happened at the White House later on the evening of Jan. 6, including Trump’s tweet at 6:01 p.m. in which he expressed no remorse for the violence of the day.
“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred election victory is so unceremoniously and cruelly stripped of the great patriots who have been treated badly and unfairly for so long,” Trump wrote. “Come home with love and peace. Remember that day forever!”
The committee continues to address security issues for both members and witnesses. Last week, Capitol police began placing officers outside the offices of all panel members. Committee staff remain concerned about the possibility of threats and intimidation directed at witnesses, an assistant told reporters on Wednesday.
The hearing will be based largely on the idea that Trump’s abandonment disqualifies him from returning to office. Trump has repeatedly indicated that he intends to run for president in 2024.
Luria and Kinzinger, both military veterans, will describe their loyalty to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, said several people familiar with the committee’s work. The commander-in-chief is required by the Constitution “to ensure that the laws are faithfully enforced,” and Trump did not, they hope to say.
Committee members have accused Thursday’s long-awaited hearing, the second scheduled for prime time, of a kind of finale that would gather evidence from the previous seven hearings to show how Trump’s refusal to accept the result of 2020 provoked violence.
But with new evidence continuing to emerge and new research targets, committee members said this week that there are likely to be more hearings later this year. The committee is likely to focus heavily on the apparent suppression of text messages by the U.S. Secret Service on Jan. 6, people said.
On Wednesday, committee leaders Thompson and MP Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) Issued a joint statement suggesting the Secret Service may have violated the Federal Records Act by failing to retain January 6 text messages during a migration of the system last year. “Every effort should be made to recover the lost data,” they said.
The question of how much money Trump and his allies have raised from and benefited from electoral denial is under discussion for his own audience.
“There is no reason to assume that this will be the final hearing,” a committee aide told reporters on Wednesday.
Committee members are already beginning to discuss what kind of recommendations to prevent a recurrence on Jan. 6 will emerge from an investigation that has dragged on for a year.
Among the possible recommendations, according to people with knowledge of those discussions: the proposed changes to the Electoral Count Act, which a bipartisan group of senators has been negotiating for months, to remove ambiguity about the role of Congress or of the vice-president in the electoral college count. votes; pass a law implementing the 14th Amendment insurrection clause, which could pave the way for trying to ban Trump from office in the future; new guidelines for emergency response in Washington; and tougher laws to control domestic terrorism and online behavior that induces violence.
The January 6 insurrection
The select committee of the House investigating the January 6, 2021 uprising has held a series of high-profile hearings throughout the summer. Read the latest audience summary.
Hearings in Congress: The commission of the Chamber that investigates the …