Even a day after January 6, Trump hesitated to condemn the violence
He struggled to do so. During an hour of trying to record the message, Trump resisted holding the rioters 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 the Jan 6 attack.
The public got their first glimpse of excerpts from that recording on Thursday night, when the committee plans to offer a bold conclusion at its eighth hearing: Not only has Trump done nothing despite repeated pleas from senior aides to help end the violence, but he sat back and enjoyed watching him. He reluctantly condemned it – in a three-minute speech on the evening of January 7 – only after efforts to annul the 2020 election failed and after aides told him members of his own cabinet were discussing invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
“That’s what he wanted to happen,” said Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.), who is scheduled to lead questioning Thursday with Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), in a interview this week. “You might have said earlier, ‘Was he incompetent? Was he someone who freezes in a moment when he can’t react to something? Or was that exactly what he wanted to happen? And after all that, I’m convinced that’s exactly what he wanted to happen.
On Wednesday, committee aides dubbed the prime-time presentation “the 187-minute hearing,” a reference to the period between Trump’s Jan. 6 Ellipse speech before protesters marched to the Capitol. and his late afternoon remarks from the Rose Garden urging the rioters to go home. The hearing will focus heavily on Trump’s inaction in the White House during this time, aides said during a background call with reporters.
“The president didn’t tell his supporters to leave the Capitol and go home until 4:17 p.m.,” said one of the aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized. to speak publicly. “We’re going to remind people that there was this inaction at the White House.”
The hearing, which the presiding judge, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), will attend remotely due to his recent covid diagnosis, is expected to take place in just under two hours, the aide said.
The hearing is also expected to tie together details from previous hearings, including the inflammatory presidential rhetoric that drew thousands to Washington that day, Trump’s willingness to grant the public fringe figures peddling fabulist and unconstitutional theories. on how he could keep the presidency and on several occasions he was asked to intervene during the violence but refused to do so.
This all points to one conclusion, which the committee plans to make on Thursday: Trump wanted the violence, he is responsible for it, and his unwillingness to help end it amounts to a dereliction of duty and a violation of his professional oath.
“It’s very clear that watching this violence was part of the plan,” Luria said. “He wanted to see it unfold. And it wasn’t until he realized it wasn’t going to work that he finally got up and said something.
A Trump spokesperson called the Jan. 6 inquiry a “distraction” from the Democrats’ “failures.”
“November is approaching, and all Democrats will have to show that for their short term with a majority in Congress, it’s another investigation that leads nowhere, while the world burns,” Trump spokesman Taylor said. Budowich.
On Tuesday, the former president posted on social media platform Truth Social that the committee – made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans – “is a fraud and a disgrace to America. No due process, no counter interrogations, no opposing witnesses, nothing at all!”
In the Jan. 7 pre-recorded speech that the White House eventually released, Trump accused that the “protesters who have infiltrated the Capitol have sullied the seat of American democracy”. He added that those who had broken the law “will pay”.
But more recently he has taken to speaking out on behalf of those arrested for their involvement in the riot, lamenting “the appalling persecution of political prisoners”.
Two live witnesses are scheduled for Thursday’s hearing: former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews and former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger. Both resigned following the events of January 6, and both are expected to explain why. Additionally, Matthews is expected to provide details about what she saw in the West Wing that day, including whether Trump knew violence had erupted when he attacked his Vice President, Mike Pence, in a 2:24 p.m. tweet.
Pence, as president of the Senate, refused Trump’s demands to reject the electoral college’s vote count that day, arguing that he had no authority to do anything other than accept votes from named voters. by the states.
The committee will also show new excerpts from recorded testimony from Pat Cipollone, the former White House attorney who made his first recorded appearance at last week’s hearing. Cipollone is expected to be shown saying he was among White House aides who vigorously pushed back against unfounded theories of voter fraud.
The committee plans to release recorded testimony from Cipollone outlining his thoughts on Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6 as well as his dismay at Trump’s recorded statement after the violence began to subside. In those comments, the president declined to read prepared remarks but instead told the rioters, after urging them to go home: “We love you. You are very special.
The committee is expected to show some of the pleas it was asked to act in and ask witnesses to describe others, people familiar with the matter said.
The committee also plans to reveal that a significant period of time elapsed from when aides were instructed to set up a camera and microphone for those remarks to when Trump actually spoke. The audience will explore what transpired at the White House later that evening on Jan. 6, including Trump’s 6:01 p.m. tweet in which he expressed no remorse for the day’s violence.
“These are the things and events that happen when a hallowed landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped of great patriots who have been treated poorly and unfairly for so long,” Trump wrote. “Go home with love and in peace. Remember this day forever!”
The committee continues to address security issues for members and witnesses. Last week, Capitol Police began stationing officers outside the offices of all panel members. Commission staff remain concerned about the prospect of threats and intimidation against witnesses, an aide told reporters on Wednesday.
The hearing will lean heavily on the idea that Trump’s failure disqualifies him from holding office again. Trump has repeatedly signaled 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, several people familiar with the committee’s work said. The Commander-in-Chief is constitutionally obligated “to see that the laws are faithfully executed” – and Trump has failed to do so, they expect to say.
Committee members framed Thursday’s long-awaited hearing — the second scheduled for prime time — as a sort of finale that would pull together evidence from the previous seven hearings to show how Trump’s refusal to accept the 2020 outcome led to violence.
But with new evidence continuing to surface – and new targets for investigation – committee members said this week there will likely be more hearings later this year. The committee will likely focus intensely on the US Secret Service’s apparent suppression of text messages on Jan. 6, the individuals said.
On Wednesday, committee leaders Thompson and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) released a joint statement suggesting the Secret Service may have violated federal records law by failing to preserve the Jan. 6 text messages during a a system migration last year. “Every effort should be made to recover lost data,” they said.
The question of how much Trump and his allies have collected – and profited from – election denial is up for debate for his own audience.
“There is no reason to assume that this will be the last hearing,” a committee aide told reporters on Wednesday.
Already, committee members are beginning to discuss the kinds of recommendations to prevent a Jan. 6 recurrence that will emerge from an investigation that has spanned more than a year.
Among the possible recommendations, according to people familiar with those discussions: proposed changes to the voter count law, which a bipartisan group of senators have been negotiating for months, to disambiguate the role of Congress or the vice -president in the tally of the electoral college votes; passage of legislation implementing the insurrection clause of the 14th Amendment, which could pave the way for an attempt to bar 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.