What was expected to be a largely superficial start for the Committee’s historic January 6 hearings began with a few bombs and a handful of heartbreaking moments.
Less than 20 minutes after the hearing, the Republican ranking on the panel — Liz Cheney of Wyoming — revealed that when then-President Donald Trump heard the insurgents calling for his vice president to be hanged, Trump had an incredible reaction.
“Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” Trump said, according to Cheney. “Mike Pence deserves it.”
That was the message Trump’s aides conveyed to the January 6 committee, and it was just one of the incredible revelations the panel made Thursday night during its first and historic hearing.
President Bennie Thompson (D-MS) also revealed during his opening statement that Trump’s own attorney general, Bill Barr, told the Jan. 6 committee that he was stepping down from the administration because he could no longer stand idly by while the leader of the nation conspired to stay in power based on lies of electoral fraud.
“I made it clear that I didn’t agree with the idea of stealing the election, that … I said the president was shit,” Barr said, leaning back in a chair during a videotaped statement.
The committee also reproduced excerpts from unpublished video interviews with Trump aides, including his daughter Ivanka Trump, to show that Trump knew his allegations of election fraud were lies; he had been told repeatedly that he had justly lost.
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller recalled how the campaign’s top data expert, Matt Oczkowski, spoke with Trump himself and “delivered some pretty blunt terms that he was going to miss.” Alex Cannon, a Trump organization lawyer who later joined the candidate’s campaign, recalled telling White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “We didn’t find anything that was enough to change the results. none of the key states, “Meadows replied. , “So it’s not there.”
Even Ivanka Trump told the committee that Barr’s assertion that there was no widespread fraud personally influenced her.
“It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he said,” he told the committee during a video-recorded virtual interview.
Cheney also made it clear that the investigation focused on some members of Congress, revealing that Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) – now chairman of the House Freedom Caucus – and “several” other Republicans called for a pardon Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.
Cheney called on his fellow Republicans to continue to profess loyalty to the former president, saying, “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your disgrace will continue.”
Thompson began the process by emphasizing that “it was the domestic enemies of the constitution who stormed … and occupied the Capitol.” And he blamed Trump directly, saying the attack was “the culmination of a coup attempt.”
“It stimulated a host of internal enemies of the constitution to march through the capital and subvert American democracy,” he said.
The committee on Thursday night also shed more light on Trump’s inaction and the role of the military in not intervening and defending the Capitol building. Cheney said Trump did not call the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, or the Secretary of Homeland Security. “Trump did not give any orders to deploy the National Guard … no effort to work with the Justice Department to deploy police assets.”
Instead, it was Pence who took on the responsibility of defending the legislators by demanding the intervention of the military.
The committee played a video of the testimony of top military general Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stated that he had “two or three calls” with Pence.
“He was very lively, very direct, very firm … bringing the military there, lowering his guard, ending this situation,” he said.
And instead of addressing the real threat that day, the White House apparently tried to cover up Trump’s inaction by trying to coerce Milley, a military official who should never have been subjected to politics, to inculcate Trump as still in charge.
Milley recalled that Meadows told him that “we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We have to establish the narrative that you know the president is still in the lead and that things are stable or stable or words in that sense “.
The committee is not only investigating the attack on the Capitol; the investigation also concerns the multi-layered attempt by former President Donald Trump and his followers to keep him in office after losing the 2020 election.
Thursday’s presentation is the first of about half a dozen public hearings in which the committee will reveal its findings. The committee will show what it has learned on several fronts: the role of Trump in what has been described as a coup attempt, the conspiracy of his followers and advisers to annul votes in several states, the intense campaign to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence. misuse their role and refuse to certify the results of the polling station, and the mafia insurrection.
Committee aides told reporters that Thursday’s hearing would focus on documenting “the reality of that violence and how horrible it was” by presenting an “unpublished” video and audio of the way the crowd tried. occupy the seat of Congress.
The panel tells the fullest story of what happened that day, something the Justice Department has been silently doing in hundreds of federal prosecutions while prosecuting criminal charges against insurgents who beat police officers, they said. breaking windows and doors to enter the Capitol illegally. the building, looted the offices of politicians, took away furniture and electronics, searched for members of Congress with kidnapping tools, and raised a gallows outside.
Even before the newscast on Thursday night, Democrats wanted to maximize audience visibility, hoping to remind the public of the deadly event. External groups organized surveillance parties across the country, including one outside the audience on a lawn on the Capitol grounds.
The event, organized by a coalition of Democratic organizations, had spectators sitting in a picnic-style style on blankets and chairs as the committee’s audio shot. In general, spectators seemed caught up in the testimony, cheering on committee members ’speeches and inquiries about the former chairman.
Only once did a large number of people look away from the screen during the first half of the audience: when the free ice cream arrived, supplied by the liberal brand Ben & Jerry’s.
This effort has faced a pending battle from the beginning. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) plans to start a formal, independent commission, such as the 9/11 Commission, set up after the terrorist attacks on US soil by Al- Qaeda, failed when Republicans refused to support its creation in May 2021..
Instead, House Democrats went ahead with a temporary nine-member committee of inquiry.
When minority leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) volunteered five Trump supporters for the panel, Pelosi rejected two of his elections: the representative. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), citing their role in undermining the election. In response, McCarthy removed all of his selections. And in response to that move, Pelosi offered the charges in July to two other Republicans who were willing to put aside the party’s growing support for the MAGA movement: Cheney and MP Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).
“What I saw was just a war scene. It was something I had seen in the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were agents on the ground. They were bleeding. They were vomiting. I saw friends with blood on his face. He was slipping through people’s blood. He was grabbing people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos. “
– Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards
The hearing ended with the moving testimony of two witnesses: documentary filmmaker Nick Quested and Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards.
Quested, a British filmmaker who had exclusive access to Proud Boys’ leadership before and during the uprising, spoke of his deep concern about how “the atmosphere seemed much darker” as the gang headed for police.
Edwards, meanwhile, revived the way he struggled to hold the bike racks together to lock in those proud boys, only to make them throw their backs brutally. He hit his head against the concrete stairs and fainted with a traumatic brain injury. When he regained consciousness, he was on guard with his companion Brian Sicknick, and was with him when he suffered devastating injuries shortly before his death.
“What I saw was just a war scene,” Edwards said. “It was something I had seen in the movies. I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were agents on the floor. They were bleeding. They were vomiting. I saw friends with blood on their faces. I was slipping through the blood of “People were catching people while they were falling. It was carnage. It was chaos.”
“I can’t even describe what I saw,” he continued. “Never in my wildest dreams did I think that, as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in a battle,” he said, trembling in his seat.
He described seeing the “ghostly pale” face of Officer Sicknick after being sprayed with caustic chemicals. She had her head in her hands, she recalled, and said she was worried because pepper spray usually makes someone’s face turn red, but Sicknick’s face was different.
“It turned as pale as a sheet of paper,” he said, lifting a blank sheet of white paper.
Ursula Perano and Matt Fuller contributed to this report.