Across seven hearings, the panel’s findings have illustrated how the president repeatedly escalated tensions following his election defeat.
Across seven hearings, the panel’s findings have illustrated how the president repeatedly escalated tensions following his election defeatPresident Trump talks with others in the Oval Office at the White House on Nov. 13, 2020. Donald Trump had already been told by his campaign manager, his top campaign lawyer and his lead data analyst that he had lost the presidential election when he was visited by his attorney general on Dec. 1, 2020.
Former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson said on June 28 former president Donald Trump threw his lunch against the wall in response to an interview. Liz Cheney , the committee’s vice chair, at the panel’s most recent hearing on July 12. “Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”
bevy of Republican members of Congress who cheered Trump on before Jan. 6 but then asked him for pardons afterward when the plot to keep Trump in office fizzled.But again and again, the committee has returned with relentless focus to the commander in chief — his knowledge, his planning, his choices. The hearings are not a legal trial. Witnesses have not been cross-examined, and some have complained the committee has played clips of their words taken from lengthy closed-door depositions without proper context. The committee — composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom are sharply critical of Trump — has made no effort to offer potentially exculpatory information.
Not all Republicans were sold on continued efforts to overturn the vote. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to the Senate floor on Dec. 15 to declare that “the electoral college has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”Others who had been with Trump until then, including members of his inner circle, privately acknowledged in conversations they later recounted to investigators that the president had lost.
The tweet galvanized Trump supporters and extremist groups around the country. Later that morning, the head of the Florida branch of the extremist group Oath Keepers, wrote on Facebook that the organization had formed an alliance with other extremists called the Proud Boys. “We have decided to work together and shut this … down,” he wrote, adding an expletive for emphasis.
“Just say the election was corrupt,” Trump told acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue during a call in late December, according to notes Donoghue took at the time. “Leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen.” That night, Justice Department officials made their last stand in a remarkable two-and-a-half-hour Oval Office showdown. During the meeting, Clark promised Trump he would do as the president desired if put in charge. Department leaders countered that thoseIt’s impossible. It’s absurd. It’s not going to happen. It’s going to fail. He has never been in front of a trial jury, a grand jury. He’s never even been to Chris Ray’s office,” Donoghue testified he told Trump.
Mike Pence had already been drafting a letter stating his view that the Constitution gave him no power to change the results of the election. Trump’s words put a target on the back of his long-loyal vice president just as the president’s angry backers began flooding the Washington area by the plane, bus and carload.
Over the final 24 hours before the Jan. 6 rally, witnesses testified that Trump drew gleeful energy from the gathering crowds, which he could hear from his desk in the Oval Office. Listening to their anger, he instructed that his speech for the Ellipse rally be altered in ways more likely to rile up his fans.
But the president’s concerns were apparently elsewhere, fixated on the apparent less-than-capacity crowd in the area set aside for the rally.
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