Instead, Trump continued to push his plan to use lawsuits and legislative delays to buy time in an obsessive bid to overturn the 2020 election, calling his lawyer and pressuring senators to stick with him. The Jan. 6 panel began its long-awaited hearing on Thursday, laying out how Trump fully intended to lead a mob on Capitol Hill, how he angrily confronted US Secret Service agents who stood in his way and how he refused to do anything to end the siege at the Capitol for more than three hours. “For 187 minutes on Jan. 6, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved — not by his aides, not by his allies … or the desperate pleas of those confronting the rioters,” said Speaker Bennie Thompson (D- MS). . “He ignored and ignored the desperate pleas of his family, including Ivanka and Don Jr., even though he was the only person in the world who could pull the mob back. He could not be moved to get up from the dining-room table … and take his message to the violent crowd.’ The committee played a recording of General Mark A. Milley, the top military official as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said, “You have an attack on the Capitol of the United States of America … and there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?” Putting together a timeline of events the world has never seen before, the committee presented a detailed account of the former president’s every move that afternoon. At 1:10 p.m., Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse, a park just south of the White House. When Secret Service agents refused to escort him to the Capitol building—ending his plan to lead MAGA-loyal insurgents—he arrived at the presidential mansion minutes later. He kept the motorcade on standby, according to videotaped testimony from a D.C. Metropolitan Police Department sergeant familiar with the day’s events from interactions with officers on that detail. At 1:24 p.m., Trump was comfortably seated in the White House dining room right next to the Oval Office. The panel revealed that Trump simply sat at the head of a wooden table in the White House dining room watching Fox News. White House records showed no phone calls, no activity, and an official White House photographer was specifically told not to take pictures. Instead, congressional investigators were forced to rely on witnesses and phone records obtained through subpoenas to look at the window of time between 1:25 p.m., when Trump entered the dining room, until he left about 4 p.m. . Meanwhile, the committee also revealed new details about then-Vice President Mike Pence’s Jan. 6 schedule. After Pence vacated the Senate chamber shortly after 2 p.m. As Pence and Secret Service agents were held in the office, rioters began to surround the Senate chamber. Secret Service agents were so disturbed by the situation that, according to an unnamed national security official monitoring the radio traffic, the agents began saying goodbye to family members. “I don’t like to talk about it,” the unnamed official, whose voice was withheld to protect his identity, told the committee Jan. 6 in a taped deposition. During the time senators were leaving the chamber, instead of instructing the military on how to intervene, Trump was calling senators encouraging them to delay the certification of the 2020 election, according to Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA ). The committee played a clip of video testimony from Kayleigh McEnany, then Trump’s White House press secretary, who recalled leaving the president with a list of senators she wanted to reach out to. “He wanted a list of senators and I left him at that point,” McEnany previously told the committee. In a deposition transcript, Trump’s White House lawyer Eric Hersman recalled telling fellow lawyer Pat Cipollone that “the president didn’t want anything done.” Summarizing the evidence, the committee found that Trump, who had been watching the violence of the uprising unfold on Fox News, was focused squarely on his plan to overturn the 2020 election through legal maneuvering. Trump called Rudy Giuliani, the lawyer leading that effort, at 1:39 p.m. and had a call that lasted four minutes, according to Giuliani’s phone records obtained by the committee. Trump and Giuliani had another phone conversation half an hour later. Two minutes after the call ended at 2:13 p.m., enraged rioters who had beaten police officers and doused them with caustic chemicals headed for the Capitol doors and smashed windows to get inside. Trump continued to watch the violence unfold on television. The committee asked Sarah Matthews, a former Trump official familiar with the White House’s public communications capabilities, how long it would take Trump to make a national address to stop the rioters. “It would take less than 60 seconds from the dining room to the briefing room,” he testified. “There’s a camera that’s on in there at all times. If the president wanted to make a statement and address the American people, he could have been there almost immediately.” The committee received live testimony from two former Trump administration officials who resigned in protest shortly after the violence that day: Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger and Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews. Both have serious credentials and commanded respect in Trump’s world – while they were there. Pottinger, a Reuters reporter turned US Marine, was brought into the Trump administration because of his national security expertise in Asia. Matthews used her White House communications role to aggressively defend Trump, defending Trump when his niece, Mary Trump, wrote a book she called a money grab. After watching the MAGA loyalist crowd storm the Capitol building, Matthews issued a statement saying, “As someone who has worked in the halls of Congress, I was deeply disturbed by what I saw today.” On the one-year anniversary of the attack, he tweeted: “Make no mistake, the events of the 6th were an attempted coup, a term we would have used had they occurred in any other country, and former President Trump failed to rise to the occasion. “ At the start of the hearing, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) began laying the groundwork to show how the twice-impeached former president failed to rise to the challenge of that day — a day of violence he created and exacerbated. “He refused to defend our nation and our constitution. He refused to do what every American president should do. In the days after January 6, no one from any political party would defend his behavior. And nobody should do that today,” he said. Perhaps for the many Republicans reeling from the impact of the violent attack over the past year and a half—a melee that left several Capitol police officers dead from physical or psychological trauma—Cheney pointed to what the top Senate Republican said in the month after the battle . The committee played a video of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) on the Senate floor placing much of the blame for Jan. 6 on Trump. “These criminals were holding his banners, waving his flag and shouting their faith in him. It was obvious. It was clear that only President Trump could end this,” McConnell said. Cheney also referred to the flood of new evidence – and witnesses – that have begun to emerge since the congressional committee began holding public hearings in June. “The dam is starting to break,” he said, noting that the commission will spend August gathering evidence and continue with additional hearings in September.
