WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump ignored pleas to call off the mob storming the U.S. Capitol and remained publicly silent as he watched the violence unfold on television from his personal dining room off the Oval Office, according to evidence and testimony to the committee investigating last year’s insurrection.
The committee’s prime-time hearing Thursday simultaneously cast Trump’s inaction during the riot as a deliberate, desperate final ploy in his struggle to hold onto the presidency and the ultimate dereliction of duty for a commander in chief sworn to uphold the law.
“President Trump did not fail to act,” Republican Representative Adam Kinzinger, a member of the Jan. 6 committee, said. “He chose not to act.”
Senior aides who were in the White House with Trump during the attack described to the committee repeated, fruitless attempts to persuade him to publicly urge his followers to leave the Capitol.
By the time Trump finally tweeted out a video asking supporters to go home, the effort to block the electoral count had clearly failed, with law enforcement help arriving and the Capitol Police starting “to turn the tide,” Kinzinger said.
The committee played audio of incredulous testimony from Gen. Mark Milley, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer, commenting on Trump’s lack of response.
“You’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s nothing? No call? Nothing Zero?” Milley said.
It was the ninth public hearing by the committee, but Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair, said it won’t be the last. The panel is continuing to gather evidence and hear from witnesses, which will lead to additional public hearings in September.
“Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued, and the dam has begun to break,” Cheney said. “We have far more evidence to share with the American people, and more to gather.”
The committee’s hearings have seized the nation’s attention, regularly drawing millions of viewers and revealing new details of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The committee said that in numerous interviews with senior law enforcement and military leaders, Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, and D.C. government officials, none heard from Trump during the attack on the Capitol. Instead, he spent the time watching television and calling Republican senators to press them to stop or delay the electoral count, he said.
There is evidence Trump didn’t want a record of what he was doing during the assault. The White House photographer was refused access to take pictures of Trump, and both the presidential call log and his activity log are largely devoid of any entries for the afternoon of Jan. 6.
“For 187 minutes on January 6, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved,” committee Chair Bennie Thompson said. “There can be no doubt he commanded a mob, a mob he knew was heavily armed, violent and angry to march on the Capitol to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power.”
Witnesses provided vivid testimony about the chaos and fear that engulfed the Capitol as Trump’s supporters stormed the building. Within minutes of the mob’s breach of the building, the situation inside became so desperate that members of Pence’s Secret Service were making calls to their families to say goodbye, an anonymous security official testified.
“The members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives,” the official said in recorded testimony.
On Secret Service radio traffic the panel played, agents spoke of smoke in the Capitol hallways and concerns they were within minutes of being overrun and losing control of the stairwell they used to evacuate Pence from the Senate chamber area.
In the midst of that, Trump posted his tweet berating Pence for not having the “courage” to overturn the election results.
“I’ve seen the impact that his words have on his supporters,” Sarah Matthews, then Trump’s deputy press secretary, told the committee. His tweet about Pence “was pouring gasoline on the fire.”
Matt Pottinger, a deputy national security adviser to Trump, told the panel he decided to resign his post when he saw Trump’s Pence tweet.
“I didn’t want to be associated with the events that were unfolding at the Capitol,” Pottinger told the committee.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone said he began urging Trump to say something “almost immediately after I found out people were getting into the Capitol... in a way that was violent.”
White House aides including chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump joined him in urging Trump to act early on, Cipollone said.
He said he “can’t think of anybody” who worked in the White House who didn’t want the riot to stop. When asked specifically if Trump wanted the riot to stop, Cipollone hesitated and looked at his lawyer, before declining to respond, citing executive privilege.
Two veterans, Kinzinger, who flew Air Force missions in Iraq, and Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria of Virginia, a retired Navy officer, led the questioning, using their own biographies at times to underscore Trump’s conduct was a breach of duty.
“Why did he not take immediate action in a time of crisis? Because President Trump’s plan on January 6 was to halt or delay congress’s official proceeding to count the votes,” Kinzinger said. “The mob was accomplishing President Trump’s purpose, so of course he didn’t intervene.”
Kinzinger said a White House employee told the panel that Trump didn’t mention the riot when he got up to leave the Oval Office dining room shortly after 6 p.m. to go to the White House residence. Instead, he just said, “Mike Pence let me down.”
