In a final public hearing of the summer and one of the most dramatic of its investigation, the committee provided a sweeping account of how, even as the lives of law enforcement officers, members of Congress and his own vice president were threatened, Mr. .Trump could not move to act until after it became clear that the rebellion had failed to disrupt Congress to confirm his election defeat. Even then, the committee showed in never-before-seen footage from the White House, Mr. Trump privately refused to concede — “I don’t want to say the election is over!” he angrily told aides as he recorded a video message written for him the day after the attack — or to condemn the attack on Capitol Hill as a crime. Calling a cast of witnesses assembled to make it difficult for viewers to dismiss as tools of a partisan witch hunt — top Trump aides, veterans and military leaders, loyal Republicans and even members of Mr. Trump’s own family — the committee found that the president rejected willfully their efforts to persuade him to mobilize a response to the deadliest attack on the Capitol in two centuries. “You are the commander-in-chief. You have an attack going on in the Capitol of the United States of America and there’s nothing?’ Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, told the panel. “No call? Nothing? Zero?” It was a closing argument in the panel’s case against Mr. Trump, one whose central contention is that the former president abandoned his job because he failed to do his best — or anything else — for 187 minutes. — to nullify the attack made in his name. Thursday’s hearing, led by two military veterans with testimony from another, was also an appeal to patriotism as the panel argued that Mr. Trump’s inaction during the uprising was a final, flagrant violation of his oath of office. of a multifaceted and failed attempt to reverse his defeat in the 2020 elections. In perhaps one of the most chilling revelations, the committee presented evidence that a call from a Pentagon official to coordinate the response to the attack on Capitol Hill as it was underway initially went unanswered because, according to a White House lawyer, “the President, I don’t want anything to happen.” And the panel played radio broadcasts and Secret Service testimony that showed in chilling detail how close Vice President Mike Pence came to danger during the uprising, including accounts of members of his Secret Service who were so disturbed by what was unfolding that they communicated with family members to say goodbye. Both testimonies were given by a former White House official, whom the committee did not identify by name – and whose voice was changed to protect his identity – who was described as having “national security responsibilities”. The witness described an exchange between Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer, and White House counsel Pat A. Cipollone about the Pentagon call. “Mr. Hersman turned to Mr. Cipollone and said, “The president didn’t want anything done,” the witness testified. “Mr. Cipollone had to take the call himself.”
Key revelations from the January 6 hearings
The committee also played dramatic 10-minute radio tapes, from 2:14 to 2:24 p.m., of the moments when the Secret Service sought a route to safety to evacuate the vice president from the Capitol. , where he was. he was held in his office near the Senate chamber as the mob closed in. “Harden that door,” said an agent. “If we’re going to move, we need to move now,” said another. And at another point: “If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to leave.” And in a terrifying moment over the radio traffic, an agent warned: “There is smoke. Unknown what kind of smoke it is.” Mr. Cipollone described to the committee how most of the rest of the White House staff believed that Mr. Trump should do more to quell the violence, but demurred when asked about the president’s view on whether the insurgency should be stop, invoking executive privilege. “I thought more should be done,” Mr. Cipollone testified. White House officials recounted how the president refused to take the few steps down the corridor to the White House briefing room to clear the mob, instead tweeting an attack on Mr Pence as he fled for his life. “I think that moment, to tweet the message about Mike Pence, is what added fuel to the fire and made it much worse,” said Sarah Matthews, a former White House press secretary who resigned on Jan. 6. and was one of two witnesses who testified in person Thursday. The other was Matthew Pottinger, a Marine Corps veteran who was the deputy national security adviser and the most senior White House official to resign on January 6. “That was the moment I decided I was going to resign, that this was going to be my last day in the White House,” Mr Pottinger said, referring to Mr Trump’s condemnation of the vice president on Twitter. “I just didn’t want to be associated with the events that were unfolding on Capitol Hill.” Ms. Matthews also told the committee that Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, confided in her that Mr. Trump did not want to mention the word “peace” in any tweets and only reluctantly caved in to his daughter Ivanka Trump’s suggestion that ask people to “keep calm”. Ms. McEnany “looked directly at me and in a hushed tone shared with me that the president did not want to include any kind of reference to peace in that tweet,” Ms. Matthews testified. While Mr. Pence made phone calls trying to deploy the National Guard to the Capitol after the evacuation to protect himself and his family, Mr. Trump did not make a single call to a government official to try to stop the violence, witnesses said. The call Mr. Trump made was to Rudolph W. Giuliani, his personal lawyer who has been helping his efforts to overturn the election results, including calling Republican senators on Jan. 6 to get them to disrupt the congressional recount. . A day after the attack, two of Mr. Trump’s communications aides lamented Mr. Trump’s response to the violence and the law enforcement toll after 150 police officers were injured and one, Brian D. Sicknick of the Capitol Police , passed away. “If he recognized the dead policeman, he would implicitly blame the mob. And he’s not going to do that, because it’s his people,” said one, Tim Murtaugh, a former communications director for the Trump campaign. “And he would also be close to recognizing that what he ignited in the rally is getting out of hand. In no way does he acknowledge anything that could ultimately be called his fault. No way.” The hearing hardly marked the end of the committee’s work. The commission now plans to enter a second phase of investigation, prepare a preliminary report and hold additional hearings in September. “The investigation is still ongoing, if not perhaps accelerating,” said Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Virginia and a committee member. “We’re getting so much new information.” Lawmakers have said they will use August, when Congress is in a long recess, to prepare a preliminary report of their findings, which is tentatively scheduled to be released in September. But a final report — complete with exhibits and transcripts — could wait until December, just before the committee is due to disband at the start of a new Congress on January 3, 2023. For Thursday’s meeting, the committee tapped two military veterans — Ms. Luria, a Navy veteran, and Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard — to lead the inquiry. “President Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and ordering the crowd to go home,” Mr. Kinzinger said. “He chose not to act.” At each of its hearings in June and July, the committee presented evidence that lawmakers believe could be used to bolster a criminal case against Mr. Trump. The committee presented evidence of a conspiracy to defraud the American people and Mr. Trump’s own donors. plans to file fraudulent voter identification that could lead to government filing charges; and evidence of a conspiracy to disrupt the vote count on Capitol Hill that suggests he could be prosecuted for obstructing an official congressional proceeding. The allegation that Mr. Trump was dereliction of duty may not be the basis for a criminal charge, Ms. Luria said, but it raised moral, ethical and legal questions. At least one judge cited Mr. Trump’s inaction as a reason to move forward with civil lawsuits against Mr. Trump. The committee spent nearly two months presenting its narrative of a president who, having failed in a series of attempts to overturn his defeat, led a crowd of supporters to march on Capitol Hill after delivering a speech berating Mr. Pence for not intervening. in the official count of the congressional electoral votes to confirm the election of Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president. On Thursday, he released testimony that underscored how even Republican members of Congress pleaded with Mr. Trump to withdraw the mob, turning to his children when the president refused to do so. Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, testified that Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, called him in the middle of the violence for help.
