Trump knew: Jan. 6 committee uses voices of those close to him to make its case of 'an attempted coup'
Donald Trump knew.
At an extraordinary hearing Thursday night, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol made the case that President Trump was told by his own top officials that he had lost the 2020 election. That he deliberately spread misinformation arguing the election had been rigged even after his own daughter had accepted it wasn’t true. That he was determined to hold on to power even though he knew his defiance might lead to violence, perhaps inevitably so.
The panel made its case using Republican voices – ranging from an attorney general Trump had appointed to supporters his words had drawn to Washington to demonstrate and then riot.
“Unprecedented” seems too small a word to use for the hearing that stretched for nearly two hours in the Cannon Caucus Room, already a place of historic moments. Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the panel’s Democratic chair, opened the hearing by trying to put the events of Jan. 6 in the context of U.S. history. American presidents had invariably accepted the results of elections, he noted, even in the wake of the Civil War.
That is, until Trump pursued a deliberate and methodical "attempted coup" that culminated on Jan. 6, Thompson said. Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair, said the president "summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”
Despite the drama, despite conducting 1,000 interviews and reviewing 140,000 pages of documents, it isn't clear whether the Jan. 6 committee will actually change any minds about what happened, about who was to blame, about what ought to be done now.
In the most recent Paste BN/Suffolk Poll, a 54% majority of Republicans agreed that the events of Jan. 6 were “legitimate political discourse." Trump remains the face of the GOP and perhaps the party's 2024 presidential nominee. In a trio of bursts on his new social media site Thursday afternoon, he derided what he called “The UnSelect Committee” and defended the rioters.
“January 6th was not simply a protest,” he said. “It represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
One sign of Trump's continued standing: Cheney, once a rising star in the GOP, has lost her position in the House Republican leadership and may well lose her House seat in the midterm elections because of her willingness to challenge him. She was one of only two Republicans who joined the committee; the other, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, isn't running for reelection.
But the panel in its choice of testimony did try to counter the attack from House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who earlier in the day called it “the most political” committee in congressional history, nothing more than a partisan witch hunt.
The first witness heard from was Trump's attorney general, William Barr, who in a clip from his videotaped deposition said he told the president the allegation that the election had been stolen from him was “bull----.” One of Trump's closest aides, Jason Miller, was shown testifying that the campaign's data analyst told the president he would lose the election. Trump's daughter Ivanka was shown saying she accepted Barr's conclusion that there was no credible evidence of significant election fraud.
In the first half of the hearing, the dozen clips used from depositions were all by Trump aides or advisers. The hearing ended with clips from supporters who said they stormed the Capitol because they believed that was what he wanted.
The committee also heard from two witnesses in the room, where Trump's first impeachment hearings had been held. One was Caroline Edwards, the first Capitol Police officer injured that day. The other was Nick Quested, a British documentarian who had been filming the far-right Proud Boys and narrated footage he and his crew had shot, some of it never before seen.
“It was carnage; it was chaos,” Edwards said, who was shown being knocked down by the mob, cracking her head against the Capitol steps and being knocked out, suffering a traumatic brain injury. When she regained consciousness, she found herself slipping in the blood of her colleagues.
The West Front of the Capitol, she said, had become an "absolute war zone."
There were some new disclosures that the committee promised to explore in later hearings. Cheney said Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and other Republican House members had sought presidential pardons after Jan. 6, for one. And she said Vice President Mike Pence tried desperately during the insurrection to summon help to the Hill, calling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, officials in Homeland Security, leaders of the National Guard.
Trump did none of that, she said.