The hearing Tuesday was the seventh for the Jan. 6 committee. Over the past month, the panel has created a narrative of a defeated Trump “detached from reality,” clinging to false claims of voter fraud and working feverishly to reverse his election defeat. It all culminated with the attack on the Capitol.
Unwilling to believe there was no election fraud, Donald Trump turned to a bunch of wild-eyed conspiracy theorists and amoral opportunists. Sidney Powell, General Flynn and Rudy Guiliani made their way under the official White House radar to pitch Trump on the idea of appointing Powell as a special counsel to probe supposed election fraud and having the federal government seize voting machines from various states, apparently in pursuit of the bizarre notion that those machines had somehow been used to steal the election for Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Tuesday’s session revealed details of an “unhinged” late night meeting at the White House with Donald Trump’s outside lawyers in a last-ditch effort to pursue his false claims of voter fraud before the defeated president summoned a mob to the U.S. Capitol.
It was a White House meeting unlike anything you’d ever imagine in our country. Or at least in any sane nation.
The House panel on Jan. 6 took us inside a meeting-cum-clash between objective reality and evidence-free autocratic idiocy, with Sidney Powell the very personification of the latter, aided and abetted by fanatical Michael Flynn, falsehood-furthering Rudy Giuliani and Patrick Byrne, the head of the online retail company Overstock.. Cipollone and other White House officials scrambled to intervene in the late-night meeting. It erupted in shouting and screaming, another aide testified.
The panel featured new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, recalling the explosive meeting at the White House when Trump’s outside legal team brought a draft executive order to seize states’ voting machines — a “terrible idea,” he said. “That’s not how we do things in the United States,” Cipollone testified. Another aide called the meeting “unhinged.”
Flynn and Powell recommended appointing Powell as a Special Counsel to investigate vote fraud.
It erupted in shouting and screaming, another aide testified. “Where is the evidence?” Cipollone demanded of the false claims of voter fraud. Pat Cipollone repeatedly challenged Powell for evidence of widespread election fraud — and that she had none. Of course she didn’t.
“What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts,” testified another White House official, Eric Herschmann. But Trump was intrigued and essentially told his White House lawyers that at least Powell and outside allies were trying to do something. “You guys are not tough enough,” Giuliani said and then added a vulgar insult in video testimony about the White House attorneys.
As night turned to morning, Trump tweeted the call for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, when Congress would be tallying the Electoral College results. “Be there. Will be wild,” Trump wrote.
“This tweet served as a call to action — and in some cases a call to arms.” said one panel member, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla. Immediately, the extremists reacted. The committee then detailed the way various right-wing conspiracy theorists and extremists, including Alex Jones of InfoWars notoriety and Sandy Hook denialism, called on their followers to come to Washington. The responses by far-right activists, agitators, and tweeters made clear they saw Trump’s tweet as a call to armed conflict. In vulgar and often racist language the messages beaming across the far-right forums planned for the big day that they said Trump was asking for in Washington. It would be a “red wedding,” said one, a reference to mass killing. “Bring handcuffs.”
Several members of the U.S. Capitol Police who fought the mob that day sat stone-faced in the front row of the committee room.
“The problem of politicians whipping up mob violence to destroy fair elections is the oldest domestic enemy of constitutional democracy,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., in opening remarks.
At the witness table to testify in person was Jason Van Tatenhove, an ally of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. Another witness was Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty last month to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building. He has said that on Jan. 2, 2021, he posted an image stating that Trump was “calling on us to come back to Washington on January 6th for a big protest.”
Ayres, who pleaded guilty to charges connected to the insurrection, said he never intended on marching to the Capitol, but that Trump got “everyone” riled up and urged them to march. He testified that he had only planned on attending the “Stop the Steal” rally at the Ellipse.
Van Tatenhove testified that Stuart Rhodes, who founded the far-right group and called on Donald Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, believed if Trump did so that it would enable the Oath Keepers to “move forward” with the goals and agenda pushed by Rhodes. ”I think we need to quit mincing words,” Van Tatenhove said. “What it was gonna be is an armed revolution. I mean, people died that day. … This could have been the spark that started a new Civil War.” Van Tatenhove told Raskin that he thought “we’ve gotten exceedingly lucky that more bloodshed did not happen,” on Jan. 6, citing the longstanding “potential” of violence among Oath Keepers and similar militia groups.
Then-President Trump’s call for his supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was planned in advance, and he intended to go with them, evidence presented at Tuesday’s congressional hearing on the insurrection showed.
“He stoked their anger. He called for them to the fight for him. He directed them to the U.S. Capitol. He told them he would join them. And his supporters believed him, and many headed towards the Capitol,” said House Select Committee member Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.). “As a result, people died. People were injured. Many of his supporters lives have never been the same.”
A draft tweet obtained by the Jan. 6 House select committee showed that prior to the insurrection, Trump had written: “I will be making a Big Speech at 10 AM on January 6th at the Ellipse (South of the White House). Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the steal!!” Trump never sent the tweet.
The committee also presented texts among Trump’s supporters in the days leading up to the insurrection that suggested that Trump’s call for his supporters to march on the Capitol was premeditated. A text from far-right activist Ali Alexander at 7:19 a.m. Jan. 5 read: “Tomorrow: Ellipse then US Capitol. Trump is supposed to order us to Capitol at end of his speech but we will see.”
Murphy explained that in the day prior to Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, the president and his aides and speechwriters fought over the content of the speech. “That speech devolved into a call to action to a call to fight,” she said, pointing to a speech revision at 5:05 p.m. on Jan. 5 that added: “All of us are here today, do not want to see our election victory stolen by beholden radical left Democrats, our country has had enough we will not take it anymore. Together, we will stop the steal.”
Trump’s edits continued into the morning of Jan. 6. When he finally delivered the speech, he added lines calling for his supporters to fight, and for Vice President Mike Pence to “be strong” in order to “take back our country.”
The committee displayed a text exchange from Jan. 4 between White House Ellipse rally organizer Kylie Kremer and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell in which the pair discussed secret plans to have Trump call for protesters to march to a second location, either the Supreme Court or Capitol on Jan. 6. Kremer urges Lindell to keep the plans secret, since they did not have permits for the march.
Organizers of the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse have continually denied culpability for the Capitol violence, saying that the two were unconnected and that Trump’s call to have people march on the Capitol was unprompted and unscripted. The revelations Tuesday demonstrate this line has always been a lie, as multiple members of Trump’s team — as well as organizers of the White House rally — had full knowledge he’d direct people to the Capitol.
The committee is probing whether the extremist groups, including the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and QAnon adherents who had rallied for Trump before, coordinated with White House allies for Jan. 6. The Oath Keepers have denied there was any plan to storm the Capitol.
Attacking the Capitol was the plan from the start (maybe from much earlier than January 4). Trump and his staff kept the planned March quiet so not to alert the National Park Service and others allowing them time to prepare. The Proud Boys went to the Capitol early to find ports of entry and weak spots. The Oath Keepers provided the military muscle but there was not enough of them to breach the Capitol. Trump riles up the base and sent them to the Capitol to provide the needed numbers to breach the Capitol. It was a planned coup attempt, in my view.
The committee began the second half of the hearing making connections between Trump allies Flynn and Roger Stone and the extremist groups who were preparing to come to Washington. It showed showing a picture of Rhodes, the Oath Keeper leader, walking with Flynn, the former national security aide to Trump, outside the Capitol at some point.
This was the only hearing this week, as new details emerge. An expected prime-time hearing Thursday has been shelved for now.
In her opening remarks at Tuesday’s January 6 committee hearing, Rep. Liz Cheney had a blunt message: Donald Trump doesn’t get to play the unwitting dupe when it comes to his role in the run-up to and riot at the US Capitol. “President Trump is a 76-year-old man,” Cheney said at one point. “He is not an impressionable child.” “Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind,” the Wyoming Republican said at another moment.
In her closing remarks, she abruptly raised the question of witness tampering, revealing Tuesday that Donald Trump had attempted to contact a person who was talking to the panel about its investigation of the former president and the 2021 attack on the Capitol. “We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” said Rep. Liz Cheney. She said the committee had notified the Justice Department.
h eyewitness accounts from the former president’s inner circle, that Trump was told “over and over,” as Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said, that he had lost the election and his claims of voter fraud were just not true. Nevertheless, Trump summoned his supporters to Washington and then sent them to the Capitol in what panel Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has called an “attempted coup.”
Shannon Larson of the Globe staff contributed to this report