Stephen Ayres, who was involved in the January 6 attack, and Jason Van Tattenhove, former spokesman for the Oath Keepers, are sworn in by the House Select Committee during the seventh public hearing in Washington on July 12.POOL/Reuters
Donald Trump hosted a chaotic six-hour White House meeting in which he discussed ordering the military to confiscate voting machines in a bid to reverse his re-election loss before issuing his infamous tweet calling for supporters to eventually storm Congress of the USA.
The meeting, described Tuesday by the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, took place on Dec. 18, 2020, four days after the Electoral College confirmed Mr. Trump’s defeat of Joe Biden and as Mr. n. Trump’s legal challenges to the result have failed.
In its seventh public hearing, the committee showed that despite being repeatedly told by his closest advisers that there was no evidence of election fraud, Mr. Trump continued to push false claims that the vote was rigged.
Those efforts culminated, the committee said, in Mr. Trump rounding up tens of thousands of protesters in Washington — including far-right militias with ties to Mr. Trump’s circle — and sending them to the Capitol.
“President Trump called a crowd in Washington,” said Liz Cheney, the committee’s Republican vice chair. “The president’s stolen election lies provoked this mob to attack the Capitol.”
Jan. 6 hearings on Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election mirror a Shakespearean story
In videotaped testimony released during the hearing, several of Mr. Trump’s advisers said they urged him to confess after the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14. In one of the depositions, his daughter, Ivanka Trump, even admitted that she thought the fight was over.
But a group of conspiracy theorists — including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, lawyer Sidney Powell and Patrick Byrne, then the chief executive of Overstock — drafted an executive order for Mr. Trump to seize the voting machines push false claims of election fraud.
When the conspiracy theorists arrived in the Oval Office on December 18, then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and other officials rushed to meet them. The encounter escalated into shouting matches that lasted late into the evening, with both sides exchanging insults.
“The screams were absolutely there,” Eric Hershman, a former White House counsel, said in the videotaped testimony. “What they were proposing, I thought was crazy.” Mr. Giuliani said he had taunted Mr. Trump’s staff with an explicit sexual term for not supporting his plan. “The meeting was INSTANT,” another aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, wrote afterward.
After the meeting, Mr Trump called on his supporters to come to Washington on January 6, when Congress was due to formally confirm the Electoral College results. “Be there, it’s going to be wild!” he tweeted.
The call sparked a flurry of activity, with groups jumping to mobilize people to come to Washington that day.
Enrique Tario and Stuart Rhodes, leaders of the far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, started a group chat with Ali Alexander, an organizer of the Stop Theft rally, to coordinate the effort. Those groups were in contact with Mr. Flynn and Roger Stone, another outside adviser to Mr. Trump, the committee said.
Members of the US House special committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday pointed to links between Trump allies and right-wing militant groups, including Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and the internet conspiracy movement QAnon.
Reuters
The committee showed videos and texts in which Mr Trump’s supporters openly called for violence on January 6. One promises a “shot”; another to see policemen “lying on the ground in a pool of their own blood”; a third said to “bring handcuffs” and devised a strategy for entering the Capitol through its underground tunnel system.
In text messages released by the committee, both White House officials and protest leaders said in the days before the riot that Mr. Trump planned to have his supporters march on the Capitol, suggesting it was an orchestrated plan.
Katrina Pearson, organizer of Mr Trump’s rally on January 6, with a text message beforehand saying Mr Trump would “call on everyone to march on the Capitol”. Mr. Trump spoke to Steve Bannon on Jan. 5, shortly before the latter said on his podcast that “hell is going to explode tomorrow,” according to phone records released by the committee.
At a rally near the White House on January 6, Mr Trump finally called on his supporters to go to Congress and “fight like hell”.
Steven Ayres, an Ohio furniture maker who pleaded guilty to trespassing at the Capitol, said in live testimony Tuesday that he joined the riot because he believed Mr. Trump’s claims of election fraud. He said he now knows those claims are false. After his arrest, Mr. Ayres lost his job and had to sell his house.
“The president pissed everybody off, told everybody to get down, so we just followed what he said,” Mr. Ayres told the committee. “It pisses me off because I was hanging on every word he was saying.”
Jason Van Tattenhove, a former spokesman for the Oath Keepers, testified that the “racist” group had intended to incite a riot.
“What would have been an armed revolution,” he said. “People died that day. Law enforcement officers died that day. A gallows was set up outside the Capitol. This could be the spark that started another civil war.
Even some of those in Mr. Trump’s orbit saw it the same way. On the evening of January 6, Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager, texted Ms Pearson. “This is about Trump insisting on insecurity in our country. A sitting president who wants civil war,” he wrote, according to a committee hearing Tuesday.
The commission is building a case that Mr. Trump tried to thwart the will of voters, first by pressuring state officials and his own Vice President, Mike Pence, to reverse the election result, then by sparking a riot at the Capitol, by during which his supporters tried to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote.
Ms Cheney said future hearings expected next week would take a closer look at the riot itself.
She also said Mr. Trump had tried to speak to an unnamed committee witness before their testimony. The witness did not speak to Mr. Trump, but instead reported the contact to the committee, which referred him to the Justice Department.
“We will take any effort to influence testimony very seriously,” she said.
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