During the most recent July 21 hearing, the committee investigating what really transpired on January 6, 2021 focused on then-president Donald Trump‘s inaction — and his refusal to tell followers to stop attacking the Capitol (for over 3 hours). Despite pleas to stop the crowd from his supporters, family and aides, the twice-impeached president encouraged the violent mob to continue, the committee pointed out, as they analyzed a minute-by-minute account of his actions (or lack thereof) that day.
“Donald Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 was a supreme violation of his oath of office and a complete dereliction of his duty,” Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican said. “It is a stain on our history.” Kinzinger noted that Trump chose not to send out his eventual message telling followers to go home until 4:17 p.m. EST that day.
This, as Huffington Post writes, was only when “it was clear that his effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers to simply declare him the winner of the 2020 presidential had failed and that law enforcement officers were regaining control of the building.”
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Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chair and Wyoming Republican, referred back to evidence from the previous 7 recent hearings. This included claims from Trump that millions of illegal votes were counted, that voting machines were somehow controlled by foreign powers and that election workers had manually manipulated totals with data from flash drives. She dubbed his claims to be “all complete nonsense.” Cheney added, “We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.”
The committee members (with the exception of absent chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who attended the meeting remotely after being diagnosed with COVID-19, entered the room to face witnesses Sarah Matthews and Matt Pottinger. (The witnesses were former Trump White House aides who were both present in the White House on Jan. 6).
Cheney presided over the hearing, and it began at 8:01 p.m. EST in the Cannon Caucus Room. She announced that due to new information received by the committee and progress with litigation, the panel is to resume hearings in September 2022. “The dam has begun to break,” Cheney said.
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The committee began the hearing with confirmation of some of the testimony by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson about a furious Trump in the presidential SUV who demanded that Secret Service take him to the Capitol to lead his followers.
Virginia Democrat Elaine Luria, (who handled questioning with Kinzinger), said an anonymous security official at the White House, said he and his colleagues were “alarmed” that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol at all because at that point, it was no longer a rally but something more like an “insurrection” or “coup.” On an audio recording, the official said, “We all knew that this would move from a normal democratic event into something else.”
Luria and Kinzinger then presented testimony from several witnesses that multiple White House staff members were trying to convince Trump to make a statement and tell his followers to leave the Capitol. Kinzinger said it was apparent from the committee’s information that Trump didn’t just fail to act on that day, but instead, “He chose not to act.”
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Matthews explained that Trump could have walked into the press briefing room at any time, and in as easily as 60 seconds if he wanted to. “If the president had wanted to make a statement and address the American people, he could have done that almost immediately,” she said, adding that cameras would have been available just as quickly. Instead, Trump stayed in his private dining room off the Oval Office watching television. “The TV was tuned to Fox News all day,” Luria said.
Trump sent out his infamous 2:24 p.m. tweet soon after (instead of trying to de-escalate the situation) that accused Pence of lacking the “courage” to do what the then-president demanded.
Trump’s aides, including White House counsel Pat Cipollone and assistant press secretary Judd Deere, told the committee that they were disappointed to see the tweet. Matthews emphasized that she knew how his supporters would take everything he said literally. “It was essentially giving the green light to these people,” she said. “They truly latch on to every word and every tweet. In that moment, it was pouring gasoline on the fire and making it worse.”
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The committee also revealed what Trump was supposed to say in the initial statement written by White House aides. Instead, at 4:03 p.m., he ignored this and ad-libbed a statement that repeated lies about the election being “stolen” from him, and at the end, he told his followers to go home and that he “loved” them.
The panel, as HuffPost reports, then showed “never-before-seen outtakes from Trump’s Jan. 7 speech to the country,” in which Trump was adamant about not criticizing his followers who had attacked police officers, (even those who threatened to kill Mike Pence and members of Congress), or to even admit that he had clearly lost the election. The video, as the publication describes, showed Trump “stumbling through a script and then flat-out refusing to say some of the lines.”
Still, “President Trump still could not say the election was over,” Luria said. Cheney then used an audio recording of Trump adviser Steve Bannon bragging days before the November 2020 election that regardless of what happened, Trump would insist that he had won, and that this was the real strategy. “Donald Trump’s plan to falsely claim victory was premeditated,” she said.
