ASHINGTON (AP) — House investigators are laying out the origins of the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, using video testimony and live witnesses to describe former President Donald Trump’s “call to action” in a December tweet and how White House advisers urged the president to drop his false claims of election fraud.
At its seventh public hearing, the Jan. 6 panel is not only detailing the plans of extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers ahead of the attack, but is keeping its focus on what was happening inside the White House at the time.
'A CALL TO ACTION … A CALL TO ARMS'
A major focus of the hearing is Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet about a “big protest” at the coming joint session of Congress: “Be there, will be wild!”
Florida Rep. Stephanie Murphy said the tweet “served as a call to action and in some cases as a call to arms.” She said the president “called for backup” as he said Vice President Mike Pence and other Republicans didn’t have enough courage to try to block President Joe Biden’s win at the Jan. 6 joint session.
The tweet “electrified and galvanized” Trump’s supporters, said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, especially “the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight.”
Raskin said Trump emboldened the groups around a common goal. “Never before in American history had a president called for a crowd to come contest the counting of electoral votes by Congress,” he said.
AN 'UNHINGED' MEETING
The committee spliced together video clips from interviews to describe a meeting from Dec. 18, in the hours before Trump's tweet, in almost minute-to-minute fashion.
Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified live before the panel two weeks ago, called the meeting between White House aides and informal advisers pushing the fraud claims “unhinged” in a text that evening to another Trump aide. Other aides described “screaming” as the advisers floated wild theories of election fraud with no evidence to back them up, and as White House lawyers aggressively pushed back.
The video clips included testimony from lawyer Sidney Powell, who had pushed some of the wildest theories, including of breached voting machines and hacked thermostats that she somehow tied to the false claims of fraud.
White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, one of the aides who pushed back, said the theories were “nuts” and “it got to the point where the screaming was completely, completely out there.”
The aides described a chaotic six hours of back and forth, starting with Trump talking to a group of the informal advisers with no White House aides present. Both Cipollone and Powell said in interviews that Cipollone, the White House counsel, rushed in to disrupt the gathering. Powell said sarcastically that she thought Cipollone set a new “ground speed record” getting there.