As a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, former President Donald J. Trump sat in his dining room off the Oval Office, watching the violence on television and decided to do nothing for hours to stop it , a number of former administration officials said. the House committee investigating the January 6 attack in the accounts presented on Thursday.
In a final public hearing of the summer and one of the most dramatic of the investigation, the panel offered a sweeping account of how, while the lives of law enforcement officers, members of Congress and their own vice president were threatened, Mr. Trump could not be moved to act until after it became clear that the riot had failed to disrupt the session of Congress to confirm his electoral defeat.
Even then, the committee showed in never-before-seen footage from the White House, Mr. Trump privately refused to concede: “I don’t want to say the election is over!” he angrily told his aides while recording a video message they had written to him the day after the attack, or to condemn the storming of the Capitol as a crime.
Calling on a cast of witnesses assembled to make viewers hard to dismiss as tools of a partisan witch hunt: top Trump aides, military veterans and leaders, loyal Republicans and even members of Mr. Trump’s own family , the committee found that the president deliberately rebuffed its efforts to persuade him to mobilize a response to the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries.
“You’re the commander in chief. You have an assault on the Capitol of the United States of America and there’s nothing? General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, he told the panel. “No call? Nothing? Zero?”
It was a sort of closing argument in the case the panel has built against Mr. Trump, a central claim of which is that the former president derelict his duty by not doing all he could, or anything, for 187 minutes. — revoke the aggression carried out on his behalf.
Thursday’s session, led by two military veterans with another testifying, was also a call to patriotism, as the panel said Mr. Trump during the riots was a final and flagrant violation of his oath of office, which came at the end of a multidisciplinary conflict. and an unsuccessful effort to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
In perhaps one of the most puzzling revelations, the committee presented evidence that a call from a Pentagon official to coordinate a response to the Capitol assault, as it was initially underway, went unanswered because, according to a lawyer from the White House, “the president is not going, I don’t want anything done.”
And the panel played radio transmissions and Secret Service testimony that showed in chilling detail just how endangered Vice President Mike Pence was during the riots, including an account from members of his Secret Service who were so affected because of what was happening that they contacted the family. members to say goodbye.
The two testimonies were provided by a former White House official who the committee did not identify by name, and whose voice was changed to protect his identity, who was described as having “national security responsibilities “.
The witness described an exchange between Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, and White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone about the Pentagon call.
“Mr. Herschmann turned to Mr. Cipollone and said, ‘The president didn’t want anything done,’” the witness testified. “Mr. Cipollone had to take the call himself.
Key revelations from the January 6 hearings
The committee also played 10 minutes of dramatic radio recordings, from 2:14 to 2:24 p.m., from the moments when the Secret Service was looking for a safe way to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol, where he was sitting. he remained in his office near the Senate chamber as the mob closed in.
“Tighten that door,” said an officer. “If we’re going to move, we have to move now,” said another. And in another point: “If we lose more time, we may lose the ability to leave.”
And in a terrifying moment over the radio traffic, an officer warned: “There is smoke. It is unknown what type of smoke it is.”
Mr. Cipollone described to the committee how most of the rest of the White House staff believed Trump needed to do more to quell the violence, but he demurred when asked about the president’s view on whether the riot should end, citing executive privilege.
“I thought more should be done,” said Mr. Cipollone.
White House officials described how the president refused to walk the few steps down the corridor to the White House briefing room to dismiss the crowd, instead tweeting an attack on Mr Pence while he was running for his life.
“I think at that point, because he tweeted the message about Mike Pence, that was him pouring gasoline on the fire and making it a lot worse,” said Sarah Matthews, a former White House press aide who resigned on 6 January and was one of two witnesses who testified in person on Thursday.
The other was Matthew Pottinger, a Marine Corps veteran who was the deputy national security adviser and the most senior White House official who resigned on January 6.
“That was the moment I decided I was going to resign, that that was going to be my last day in the White House,” Pottinger said, referring to the vice president’s Twitter condemnation of Mr. trump “I just didn’t want to be associated with the events that were unfolding in the Capitol.”
Ms. Matthews also told the committee that Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, confided in him that Mr. Trump had refused to mention the word “peace” in any tweets and only reluctantly caved to his daughter Ivanka Trump’s suggestion that he ask people to “stay peaceful.”
Ms. McEnany “looked directly at me and in a hushed tone shared with me that the president did not want to include any mention of peace in this tweet,” Ms. Matthews said.
While Mr. Pence made phone calls trying to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol after evacuating to protect himself and his family, Trump did not make a single call to a government official to try to stop the violence , witnesses said. The call made by Mr. Trump called Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer, who was helping his efforts to overturn the election results, including calling Republican senators on Jan. 6 to get them to stop the congressional recount.
A day after the attack, two of Mr. Trump lamented the response of Mr. Trump on violence and the cost of law enforcement, after 150 officers were injured and one, Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police, was killed.
“If he acknowledged the dead cop, he would implicitly blame the mob. And he won’t, because they’re his people,” said one, Tim Murtaugh, a former communications director for the Trump campaign. “And I would also be close to admitting that what ignited the rally got out of control. He in no way acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault. No way.”
The hearing was not the end of the commission’s work. The panel now plans to enter a second stage of investigation, prepare a preliminary report and hold additional hearings in September.
“The investigation is still ongoing, if not possibly accelerating,” said Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Virginia, a member of the committee. “We’re getting a lot of new information.”
Lawmakers said they would use August, when Congress takes a long recess, to prepare a preliminary report of their findings, tentatively scheduled for release in September. But a final report, complete with exhibits and transcripts, could wait until December, just before the committee disbands at the start of a new Congress on Jan. 3, 2023.
For Thursday’s session, the panel turned to two military veterans: Ms. Luria, a Navy veteran, and Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, to lead the questioning. .
“President Trump didn’t stop performing for the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the crowd to go home,” Kinzinger said. “He chose not to act.”
At each of its hearings in June and July, the panel has presented evidence that lawmakers believe could be used to bolster a criminal case against Trump. The committee presented evidence of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and Mr. Trump’s own donors; plans to submit fake voter list that could lead to charges for filing false documents with the government; and evidence of a plot to disrupt the election count on Capitol Hill that suggests he could be prosecuted for obstructing an official congressional proceeding.
The claim that Mr. Trump abandoned his duty might not be the basis for a criminal charge, Ms. Luria said, but it raised ethical, moral and legal questions. At least one judge has cited Mr. Trump’s inaction as a reason for civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump moving forward.
The committee has spent nearly two months laying out its narrative of a president who, after failing in a series of efforts to overturn his defeat, led a crowd of his supporters to march on the Capitol after giving a speech exhorting Mr. Pence not to interfere. in the official count of congressional ballots to confirm the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president
On Thursday, he revealed testimony that underscored how even Republican members of Congress were pleading with Mr. Trump to recall the Mafia, turning to his children when the president refused to do so.
Jared Kushner, adviser and son-in-law of Mr. Trump said Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, had called him amid the violence to ask for help.