Donald Trump scribbled the words on Twitter that motivated him Right-wing extremists sought blood on January 6, 2021 and kept a secret plan to direct their supporters at the Capitol that day, according to evidence and testimony presented Tuesday at the seventh hearing of the House select committee investigating the pro-Trumps. disturbis.
The tweet was posted at 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, after an hour-long meeting with outside advisers on the confiscation of voting machines that a White House adviser described in real time as to “bewildered.”
“Great protest in DC on January 6,” the president wrote. “Be there, it will be wild!”
The message marked a turning point in Trump’s efforts to stay in power and, according to MP Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), “Would galvanize his supporters, trigger a political storm and change course. of our history as a country. “
In particular, the committee member said, the president’s decision to announce a protest on Jan. 6 caused the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two far-right groups that have historically not worked together, to come together. and coordinate their planning, including with DC maps indicating police location.
The tweet also illustrated, committee members said, Trump’s boss intensifying efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power at every time he had the opportunity to reduce them.
This trend, they argued, was illustrated for his contempt for the advice of his lawyers. A clip of the new testimony of White House attorney Pat Cipollone showed he was among those rejecting baseless conspiracy theories launched by pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, demanding during a prolonged meeting at the White House in December. 18, 2020, “Where is the evidence?”
And the same inclination has continued to shape Trump’s behavior, said Deputy Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), vice chair of the committee, who said the former chairman had recently tried to call a witness in the panel’s investigation. He said the committee had notified the episode to the Justice Department, promising: “We will take any effort to influence the testimony of witnesses very seriously.”
As he has done during this summer’s hearings, Cheney insisted on Trump’s ultimate responsibility for instigating an insurrection that was built on a lie. “President Trump is a 76-year-old man,” he said. “He is not an impressionable child. Like everyone in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
The committee presented evidence showing that Trump’s tweet on Dec. 19 disrupted planning for protest activity that would eventually lead to deadly chaos at the Capitol. Originally, a pro-Trump group called Women for America First had been preparing for a rally following the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20th. But after the president’s tweet, the group changed the permit on Jan. 6, according to documents shown by the House panel.
Among the pro-Trump influencers who enjoy wide online followers, the tweet was a siren. Alex Jones, Infowars’ far-right host, said: “President Trump, early this morning, tweeted that he wants the American people to march on Washington.” Tim Pool, a prominent youtuber, said on Jan. 6, “This could be Trump’s last battle.” And Matt Bracken, a right-wing commentator, materialized, imagining himself “entering the Capitol directly.”
Further, the tweet caused the violent rhetoric to spread to anonymous pro-Trump sectors of the internet. “Trump just told us to come armed,” a message said. Another user said volunteers were needed “for the firing squad.” Jim Watkins, the owner of the online message board where the QAnon extremist ideology took root, told the House panel that he was moved by Trump’s tweet. “When the president of the United States announced that he was going to hold a rally, I bought a ticket and left.”
Some of the messages were “openly homicidal,” Raskin said, and full of racists and genocides. cries of concentration. One asked, “Why don’t we kill them?… To the last Democrat….” Another said, “The white revolution is the only solution.”
A post on a popular pro-Trump forum, thedonald.win, imagined police officers “lying on the ground in a pool of blood.” The site’s founder, Jody Williams, told the committee that the president’s tweet focused attention on Jan. 6.
“After it was announced that the sixth would go there to speak, then yes, everything else closed, and it would only be the sixth,” Williams said.
A post on this forum clicked: “JOIN THE LOCAL PRIDE CHILDREN CHAPTER TOO.”
The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, some of whose members have been charged with conspiracy related to Jan. 6, “responded immediately to President Trump’s call,” Raskin said.
Kelly Meggs, the head of the Florida branch of the Oath Keepers, took to Facebook on the morning of Dec. 19 to declare an alliance between the two groups, and wrote, “We’ve decided to work together and close this …” , with an insult to emphasize.
Telephone records obtained by the committee, Raskin said, show that Meggs called Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who has been accused of conspiracy in the attack on the Capitol, that afternoon.
The attack: the siege of the United States Capitol on January 6 was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event
The next day, the Proud Boys “got to work,” Raskin said, launching an encrypted chat called “Ministry of Self-Defense,” in which they used DC maps and other tools to engage in strategic planning and tactics on Jan. 6. ”
The lawmaker said members of the two extremist groups worked with Flynn, the former lieutenant general who attended the Dec. 18 meeting at the White House and had been photographed a few days before being guarded by an Oath Keeper, as well as with Trump’s friend Roger Stone. Both men were pardoned in the last weeks of the Trump administration.
The committee obtained encrypted content from a group chat called “Friends of Stone” or FOS, which Raskin said included Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, among others. In the chat, Rhodes said anyone who could not travel to DC should launch protests in their state capitals. He also asked Trump to invoke martial law, according to the video shown by the committee.
Flynn did not respond to a request for comment. Stone, in a text message, said, “Any statement or implication of which I knew in advance, was involved in or approved of any illegal act at the Capitol on January 6 is categorically false.” He defended his decision to deliver a speech on January 5 “consistent with my constitutional rights to free speech to skepticism about the anomalies and irregularities in the 2020 elections. I am certainly entitled to my apocalyptic view of the future of the United States as expressed in my speech “.
Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Trump attacked the Social Truth committee, the social media platform developed by his allies after being banned on Twitter, saying the investigation was an effort to damage his poll numbers.
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), Who co-chaired Tuesday’s hearing, presented evidence that Trump had planned to lead his supporters to the Capitol, but kept his intentions veiled.
An undated draft tweet, marked as seen by the president, promoted his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse and concluded, “March to the Capitol afterwards. Stop the robbery !!”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson wrote in an email after a Jan. 2 call with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that “the president’s expectations are to have something intimate. in the Ellipse i he calls on everyone to march to the Capitol. “
The organizers of the rally indicated that they were aware in advance that the president would issue the call at the last minute. “POTUS will ask for it unexpectedly,” Kylie Kremer, leader of Women for America First and organizer of the demonstration at the Ellipse, wrote in a text message on Jan. 4. He did not respond to a request for comment.
Ali Alexander, another organizer of the pro-Trump protest activity, also exposed prior knowledge of the president’s plans in a text message the next day. “Trump is supposed to order us to go to the capitol at the end of his speech, but we’ll see,” he wrote.
Alexander said Tuesday he did not remember who notified him of the president’s statements. “Plans were changing every day,” he said. “We followed the flow and focused on compliance.”
But Murphy said the “evidence confirms that this was not a call for spontaneous action, but a deliberate strategy decided in advance by the president.”
When he executed this strategy, and untimely comments that instructed his supporters to “show strength” and “fight like hell,” in the changes to his prepared speech revealed by evidence from the National Archives and witnesses, according to Murphy, the images of the violence that arose from the Capitol hours later left some of his former aides uncomfortable.
Five conclusions of the hearing on extremism and Trump
Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager he had moved away from the re-election effort, reacted to Trump’s behavior in a text message that night to Pierson. “An incumbent president calls for a civil war,” he wrote.
“If I were Trump and you knew my rhetoric killed someone,” he added. When Pierson stepped back and said, “It wasn’t rhetoric,” Parscale replied, “Katrina. Yes, it was.”
Parscale now advises Trump’s PAC leadership, Save America, and the group has paid $ 150,000 since it sent these text messages. He declined to comment. But one person familiar with Parscale’s thinking said he was angry with Trump at the time for firing him as campaign manager. and the president thought I should have commented hours before I did to say …