The January 6 committee probed Donald Trump’s encouragement of extremist groups to join his cause of preventing a peaceful transfer of power in its latest public hearing on Tuesday.
The committee drew a direct line between the president’s rhetoric and the violence of that day, accusing Mr Trump of directing angry militias and extremists to the Capitol building to stop the certification of the election he lost.
The most egregious example of this, the committee said, was a tweet from the then-president about a rally on January 6 in which he urged his supporters to “be there, be wild”.
“This tweet served as a call to action, and in some cases a call to arms, for many of president Trump’s most loyal supporters,” committee member Stephanie Murphy said.
The hearing focused on the role of extremist groups the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in the attack on the US Capitol. Members of both groups are known to have been front and centre of the attack on the Capitol on January 6, and the leaders of both have been charged with seditious conspiracy for their involvement in the events of that day.
Here are the key takeaways from Tuesday’s hearing.
A ‘crazy’ and ‘unhinged’ White House meeting
A White House meeting described variously as “crazy,” “contentious,” “unhinged” and “hot-blooded” was at the centre of Tuesday’s hearing.
On 18 December, just four days after the electoral college met to certify the election for Joe Biden, an outside legal team assembled by Mr Trump met with the president alone for 10 to 15 minutes and presented him with various conspiracy theories about how the election was stolen.
They brought with them a draft executive order to seize voting machines across the country and launch a special investigation into election fraud.
Mr Trump’s White House advisers did not know the meeting was taking place. When they joined, fireworks ensued. A screaming match erupted between the White House advisers and the outside team of Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn, among others. There were even threats of physical violence.
Eric Herschman, a former White House lawyer, said “the screaming was completely out there”.
“What they were proposing I thought was nuts,” he added.
Pat Cipollone, White House counsel to Mr Trump, forcefully rejected the plan to seize voting machines.
“To have the federal government seize voting machines? That’s a terrible idea for the country. That’s not how we do things in the United States,” Mr Cipollone testified he said.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide whose own bombshell testimony revealed Mr Trump’s thinking before January 6 in the committee’s previous hearing, wrote in a text message after the meeting had wrapped up: “The west wing is UNHINGED.”
Committee member Jamie Raskin described the 18 December meeting as “critically important” because the president “got to watch up close for several hours as his White House Counsel and other White House lawyers destroyed the baseless factual claims and ridiculous legal arguments being offered by Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and others.”
The implication is that Mr Trump knew that his claims of a stolen election were bogus, and that he went all out to cling to power anyway.
Tweets that ‘electrified and galvanised’ extremists
The committee homed in on a tweet sent by the president on 19 December at 1.42am in which he called on his supporters to “‘Be there, be wild” at the planned protest on January 6.
Committee member Jamie Raskin said that tweet “electrified and galvanised” his supporters, “especially the dangerous extremists in the Oathkeepers, the Proud Boys and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight against the government.”
The committee showed how it reverberated among right-wing and conspiracy theorist groups, and immediately set off a flurry of planning for January 6. Mr Raskin said the online rhetoric turned “openly homicidal”.
The committee heard from a former employee of Twitter who was involved in discussions around how the company should respond to Mr Trump’s increasingly heightened online rhetoric.
“My concern was that the former president, for seemingly the first time, was speaking directly to extremist organisations in giving them directives,” the anonymous former employee said in videotaped testimony.
The committee also played testimony from Jody Williams, the owner of a pro-Trump forum, who said the tweet created a laser-like focus on that one day.
“After it was announced that he was going to be there on the 6th to talk, then everything else was kind of shut out. And it was just going to be on the sixth,” he said.
Posts on that forum began to openly share plans and violent threats for January 6.
“Bring handcuffs and wait near the tunnels,” wrote one user. Another urged users to join their local Proud Boys chapter.
Mr Raskin added: “While Trump supporters grew more aggressive online, he continued to rile up his base on Twitter.”
Donald Trump planned to direct crowds to march on the Capitol before January 6
In his speech at the Ellipse on January 6, Mr Trump urged a crowd of thousands of his supporters to march on the Capitol building, where Joe Biden’s election victory was being certified.
The committee revealed evidence that showed that the call to march on the Capitol was planned in advance by Mr Trump, but that he wanted it to look spontaneous.
The committee obtained from the National Archives a draft tweet written for the president’s Twitter account but never sent that read: “I will be making a big speech at 10am on January 6 at the Elipse (South of the White House lawn). Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!”
The tweet was marked with the words: “president has seen.”
The committee also presented an email written by Katrina Pierson, a former Trump spokesperson, to January 6 rally organisers:
“POTUS expectations are to have something intimate at the Elipse and call on everyone to march to the Capitol,” she wrote.
Kylie Jane Kremer, another rally organiser, said in a 4 January text message shown by the committee that the plan was to keep the march to the Capitol secret.
“This stays only between us, we are having a second stage at the Supreme Court again after the ellipse,” Ms Kremer wrote. “POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol. It cannot get out about the second stage because people will try and set up another and sabotage it. It can also not get out about the march because I will be in trouble with the national park service and all the agencies but POTUS is going to just call for it, quote, ‘unexpectedly.’”
Trump’s White House counsel wanted him to concede
The committee heard that Mr Trump had been counselled by all of his senior advisers to concede the election when it became clear that there was no evidence of widespread fraud and all legal challenges had been resolved.
For the first time on Tuesday, they played testimony from the president’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, who said he thought Mr Trump should have conceded after the Electoral College certification on 14 December 2020.
“If your question is ‘did I believe he should concede the election at a point in time’, yes, I did,” Mr Cipollone said.
“I believe [Republican Senate] Leader McConnell went on to the floor of the Senate, I believe in mid-December and basically said the process is done – that would be in line with my thinking on these things,” Mr Cipollone told the committee in pre-recorded testimony on Friday but which was first revealed publically on Tuesday.
Trump Attorney General Bill Barr testified that he believed the certification on 14 December was “the end of the matter” and that it would lead to a “new administration”.
Mr Cipollone said that Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows shared this view.
‘A president asking for civil war’
In the aftermath of the Capitol attack, some of Mr Trump’s own advisors and former advisers seemed to realise the significance of what had transpired at the Capitol.
One of the most striking examples of those realisations was revealed by the committee in not-before-seen text messages from Brad Parscale, Mr Trump’s former campaign manager, to Katrina Pierson, a former spokesperson for Mr Trump. In those messages, Mr Parscale put the blame for the violence of January 6 on the shoulders of Mr Trump.
“A sitting president asking for civil war. This week I feel guilty for helping him win,” Mr Parscale wrote.
