WASHINGTON – The Jan. 6 committee Tuesday focused on ways far-right violent extremists responded to Donald Trump’s tweet for a major rally in Washington as a “call to arms,” as the panel asked whether coordinated with White House allies in the deadly US Capitol attack and effort to nullify the 2020 presidential election.
The panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol siege is delving into what it calls the final phase of Trump’s multi-pronged effort to stop Joe Biden’s victory. As dozens of lawsuits and false claims of voter fraud fizzled out, Trump met late into the night on Dec. 18 with lawyers at the White House before tweeting the rally invitation: “Be there, it’s gonna be wild!” Members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers now facing unusual charges of sedition responded quickly.
“This tweet served as a call to action and, in some cases, a call to arms.” said panel member Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla.
Tuesday’s hearing is the seventh for the Jan. 6 committee. Over the past month, the panel has created a narrative of a defeated Trump “cut off from reality,” clinging to false claims of voter fraud and working feverishly to reverse his electoral loss. It all culminated in the attack on Capitol Hill, the committee says.
The panel featured new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House lawyer, recalling the explosive late-night meeting at the White House when Trump’s outside legal team introduced a draft executive order to seize voting machines from states: a “terrible idea,” he said.
“This is not how we do things in the United States,” Cipollone testified.
Cipollone and other White House officials rushed to intervene in Trump’s late-night meeting with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, retired national security adviser Michael Flynn and the head of online retailer Overstock. He erupted in screaming and screaming, another attendee testified.
“Where is the evidence?” Cipollone demanded of the false allegations of electoral fraud.
“What they were proposing, I thought, was crazy,” another White House official, Eric Herschmann, testified.
But Trump was intrigued and essentially told his White House lawyers that at least Powell and his outside allies were trying to get something done.
“You guys are not tough enough,” Giuliani recalled in video testimony the president told White House lawyers. “You guys are p—–,” he said, using foul language.
As night turned into morning, Trump tweeted the call for supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, when Congress would count the results of the Electoral College. “To be there. It will be wild,” Trump wrote.
Immediately, the extremists reacted.
The panel displayed graphic and violent text messages and played videos of right-wing figures, including Alex Jones, and others exposing that January 6 would be the day they would fight for president.
In vulgar and often racist language, messages broadcast on far-right forums planned for the big day they said Trump was calling for in Washington. It would be a “red wedding,” said one, referring to the mass murders. “Bring handcuffs.”
Several members of the US Capitol Police who fought the mob that day sat stone-faced in the front row of the committee room.
“The problem of politicians fomenting mob violence to destroy fair elections is constitutional democracy’s oldest enemy within,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said in his opening remarks.
Jason Van Tatenhove, an ally of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, was expected to testify in person. Another witness was to be Stephen Ayres, who pleaded guilty last month to disorderly conduct and disorderly conduct in a restricted building. He has said that on January 2, 2021, he posted an image saying that Trump was “calling us to come back to Washington on January 6 for a big protest.”
The committee is investigating whether extremist groups, including Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and QAnon supporters who had earlier rallied for Trump, coordinated with White House allies by Jan. 6. The Oath Keepers have denied that there is any plan to storm the Capitol.
It is the only hearing scheduled for this week, as new details emerge. A hearing expected in prime time for Thursday has been shelved for now.
This week’s session comes after former White House adviser Cassidy Hutchinson provided stunning sworn accounts of an angry Trump knowingly sending armed supporters to Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 and then refusing to promptly call them off. when the violence broke out, siding with the rioters as he menacingly sought out Vice President Mike Pence.
Trump has said that Cassidy’s account is not true. But Cipollone in Friday’s private session did not contradict earlier testimony. Raskin said the panel planned to use “a lot” of Cipollone’s testimony.
On Dec. 29, the president of the Proud Boys posted a message on social media saying that members planned to “show up in record numbers on Jan. 6,” according to a federal indictment.
The group planned to meet at the Washington Monument, its members were instructed not to wear their traditional black and yellow colors, but to go “incognito.”
The Proud Boys have said their membership grew after Trump, during his first debate with Biden, refused to outright condemn the group, instead telling them to “stand back and wait.”
The night before Jan. 6, Proud Boys frontman Enrique Tarrio met with Oath Keepers frontman Rhodes in an underground parking garage, according to court documents along with footage a documentarian who followed the group provided to the panel.
The Oath Keepers had also been organizing for Jan. 6, setting up a “rapid response force” at a nearby hotel in Virginia, according to court documents.
After the Capitol siege, Rhodes called someone with an urgent message for Trump, another member of the group said. Rhodes was denied the opportunity to speak with Trump, but he urged the person on the phone to tell the Republican president to call on militia groups to fight to keep the president in power.
An attorney for Rhodes recently told the committee that he wants to testify publicly. Rhodes has already been interviewed by the committee in private, and the panel is unlikely to agree.
The panel also intends to point out that many of the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol appeared to be QAnon believers. Federal authorities have explicitly linked at least 38 protesters to the pro-Trump conspiracy theory, according to an Associated Press review of court records.
One of the most recognizable figures from the attack was a shirtless man from Arizona who called himself the “QAnon shaman,” carrying a spear and wearing face paint and a Viking hat with fur and horns.
A central belief among QAnon supporters is that Trump was secretly fighting a cabal of “deep state” operatives, prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites, some of whom worship Satan and engage in child sex trafficking.
The panel has shown, over the course of expedited hearings and eyewitness accounts from the former president’s inner circle, that Trump was told “over and over again,” as Vice President Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, put it, that he had lost. the election and his claims of voter fraud were simply not true. However, Trump summoned his supporters to Washington and then sent them to Capitol Hill in what the panel’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., called an “attempted coup.”
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Associated Press writers Michael Balsamo, Farnoush Amiri and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington and Michael Kunzelman in College Park, Maryland, contributed to this report.