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Former President Donald Trump called those who took part in the Capitol demonstrations and attack on January 6, 2021, “smart” during a provocative interview last spring, according to a documentary director who gained wide access to Trump and his family now. cooperates with the commission of the Chamber that investigates the uprising.
“A very small part, as you know, went down to the Capitol, and then a very small part of them entered. But I will tell you, they were angry in terms of what happened in the election, because they are smart and they see. And they saw what happened. I believe that was a big part of what happened on January 6, “he told British director Alex Holder in an interview in March, according to a video reviewed by The Washington Post.
Trump said it was a “sad day,” but did not suggest rejecting the events, according to footage reviewed by The Post and the director.
Holder met with commission investigators on Thursday, Jan. 6, in a closed-door session and provided the panel with more than 10 hours of footage of interviews with Trump, his elderly children, former Vice President Mike Pence, and footage of the Capitol attack itself. Holder said he was surprised he had not been summoned earlier, but received a summons last week from the commission.
Holder was interviewed for about two hours, but declined to say what the commission officials asked him “out of respect for the ongoing investigation,” his spokeswoman said.
Holder said he interviewed Trump three times in December 2020, March 2021 and May 2021 for a documentary called “Unprecedented” and scheduled for release this summer. The film was purchased by Discovery Plus, a company spokesman said.
The film was intended to describe Trump’s re-election campaign and his relationship with his older children, he said. Holder said he was not present at the planning of the January 6 events and has no personal details about their origins.
In his December 45-minute interview at the White House diplomatic reception, the director said Trump was in a bad mood and obsessed with the 2020 election, looking for ways to stay in office and talking about how he should pressure on officials in Georgia and the Supreme Court. “He had barricaded himself in the White House,” he said. “He did not talk to the press or do anything. … He said we need to find good judges to help us.
The documentary filmmaker said Trump never admitted to losing the election – and reiterated the same allegations of fraud and protests that he won the election in private as well as in public. Trump also did not specify a January 6 date with him at his first meeting, and the president’s and Pence’s children similarly never mentioned the date before the attack, he said.
In March at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in South Florida, Holder said Trump was challenging and took no responsibility for Jan. 6 and remained obsessed with the election, even moving the discussion away from softer issues for his family. He spoke in detail about the size of his crowd that day, boasting that it was the largest crowd he had ever attracted.
“I would raise other topics like his children, and he would talk about it, but he always wanted to go back to the polls,” Holder said.
A Trump spokesman did not comment.
Holder said Trump’s children praised his father for fighting the election in interviews in December. “They were really repeating their father,” he said. “You could say they really admire their father.”
After Jan. 6, he said the Trump family refused to talk about it at all, as did Pence, who interviewed the documentary a few days after Jan. 6. “And we’ll clarify that in the film,” he said. A person familiar with the project said it wasn’t presented as a Jan. 6 project, but instead for the Trump family and Trump as a father.
Holder said he was present when Pence received an email about the 25th Amendment to the Constitution – which sets out procedures for removing a president from office – but declined to describe Pence’s reaction.
“He didn’t look crazy,” Holder said. “People around him were nervous. He told us he wasn’t as good a golfer as Trump. He seemed optimistic about America’s future.
Holder said he believed the commission would be interested in six hours of footage he shot on Jan. 6, when he was not in the White House but with Capitol Hill rebels. He was not with Trump or Pence that day, he said.
Holder said the family wanted to star in the documentary as a “legacy project” and that he spoke with family members before the election, but not with Trump until after the election. He met the family’s associates, Holder said, through a project he is shooting in the Middle East. A person familiar with the matter said he was introduced to Trump’s family by Jason Greenblatt, a Middle East envoy to the Trump administration.
“They all thought they would win,” he said.
He said he was given access to Air Force One, the White House and election events, and some of his crew were sometimes closer to Trump “than his own Secret Service agents.”
Many campaign officials said they had no idea Holder was making a documentary. “I don’t think there was any doubt that our family kept us away from the campaign. We had some interaction with them, but not much, “he said.
The documentary filmmaker said that Trump never admitted in private that he had lost. “I had the opinion before I met with him that he did not really believe that the election was rigged,” he said. “Absolutely not. He is absolutely convinced.”
He also said that in the last interview, the director finally managed to get Trump to talk about his children and other topics other than elections. Trump has been criticized for being kicked out of social media.
“I showed him on my iPad a video of his children campaigning for him – it was a really interesting moment. He said, “They all have their own base, but it’s really part of my base,” Holder said. “There were elements of being proud of your children.
He said Trump also expressed a surprising amount of honesty about his diagnosis of coronavirus. “He said he was scared of covid, how sick he was and how he had friends who died,” Holder said.
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