The hearings of the House January 6 committee have presented some extraordinary testimony about Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his supporters’ deadly assault on the US Capitol. Ahead of the primetime TV hearing on Thursday night, here are some of those pivotal moments so far.
Hutchinson’s bombshells
Some said that in Cassidy Hutchinson the committee had found its John Dean, the White House counsel who turned on Richard Nixon during Watergate.
Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s chief of staff, delivered her dramatic testimony with notable calm. She made headlines by describing how Trump struggled physically with a Secret Service agent who would not let him march to the Capitol himself, and how the president, furious, hurled his dinner at the White House wall.
More importantly, Hutchinson described how Trump knew some in the crowd who heard him speak on January 6 were armed – and told them to march on the Capitol anyway. Many observers said such testimony could be crucial to establishing criminal intent, and therefore central to any criminal charges against Trump.
Van Tatenhove’s warning
Jason van Tatenhove, a former spokesperson for the far-right group the Oath Keepers, testified about links between Trump and the far right. Van Tatenhove said the president attempted to mount “armed revolution”. He also said the Oath Keepers leader once asked him to create a deck of cards showing key targets, among them Hillary Clinton.
“People died [on 6 January 2021],” Van Tatenhove said. “Law enforcement officers died, there was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol.
“This could have been the spark that started a new civil war, and no one would have won there. That would have been good for no one.”
Cheney’s cliffhangers
Liz Cheney has been the star of the hearings. A hardline Wyoming Republican nonetheless at odds with her party, she has offered successive cliffhangers, each setting up the next session. One was about Trump advisers and allies in Congress seeking pardons.
But what she said about possible witness tampering made, perhaps, the biggest impact. In the Hutchinson hearing, Cheney revealed that Trump associates had contacted a witness to say the former president would be watching the hearings and reading transcripts. The witness turned out to be Hutchinson. After the hearing on far-right links to Trump, Cheney said Trump himself had attempted to call another witness, not yet seen.
Trump’s enablers
The committee’s reconstruction of an 18 December 2020 meeting at the White House between Trump’s official and unofficial advisers was for the ages. Witnesses including Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, described shouts and threats from members of so-called “Team Crazy”, which included Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn.
Giuliani remembered calling the White House advisers “pussies”. Powell said it was the official aides who were crazy, for not backing a scheme to seize voting machines. She also drank a lot of Dr Pepper.
Eric Herschmann, a former Trump Organization lawyer who testified by video in front of a baseball bat with “justice” written on it, said Flynn, a retired general, “screamed at me that I was a quitter and kept standing up and turning around and screaming at me. I’d sort of had it with him so I yelled back, ‘Either come over or sit your fucking ass back down.’”
Trump aides who resisted him – or checked out of attempts to contain him – also testified. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner spoke. William Barr, the attorney general who resigned, said he told Trump his claim of a stolen election was “bullshit”.
Trump’s victims
Brad Raffensperger and Gabe Sterling, Republican officials in Georgia, described their refusal to “find” the votes Trump needed to overturn his defeat there, and how they in turn were threatened.
Rusty Bowers, speaker of the Arizona House, detailed how he refused to go along with efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in that state, prompting threats as his daughter lay desperately ill.
But perhaps most emotionally affecting of all, two Georgia poll workers told how they became the target of absurd conspiracy theories pushed by Trump and his allies.
Shaye Moss told the panel she received “a lot of threats. Wishing death upon me. Telling me that I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.’”
Ruby Freeman said: “I’ve lost my name and I’ve lost my reputation. I’ve lost my sense of security, all because a group of people starting with [Trump] and his ally Rudy Giuliani decided to scapegoat me and my daughter Shaye, to push their own lies.”
Raskin’s appeal
Jamie Raskin, a congressman from Maryland, struck a lasting note with his closing statement on how far-right groups came to attack the Capitol.
Quoting Alexander Hamilton, Raskin said Trump resembled politicians who “begin first as demagogues pandering to the angry and malignant passions of the crowd, but then end up as tyrants, trampling the freedoms and the rights of the people”.
His words recalled those of Caroline Edwards, a police officer who described trying to hold back the mob:
“I can remember my breath catching in my throat because what I saw was a war scene. Officers on the ground. They were bleeding, on the ground, throwing up … I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”
Saying “the Watergate break-in was like a Cub Scout meeting compared to this assault on our people and our institutions”, Raskin concluded: “Constitutional democracy is the silver frame, as Lincoln put it, upon which the golden apple of freedom rests. We need to defend both our democracy and our freedom with everything we have.”
