Testimony Concluded Trump Preplanned the Insurrection
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| American carnage, nice things to some so-called some Americans. |
The Jan. 6 panel presented evidence that Trump preplanned a march to the Capitol.
WASHINGTON — President Donald J. Trump planned to lead a march of his angry supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6 but wanted it to look like a spontaneous decision, people involved in the plans told the committee investigating the mob violence that overtook the Capitol.
According to documents obtained from the National Archives, Mr. Trump reviewed a tweet that said: “I will be making a Big Speech at 10AM on January 6th at the Ellipse (South of the White House). Please arrive early, massive crowds are expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!”
The tweet was never sent, but Mr. Trump let his allies know in advance that his plan was to direct the crowd to the Capitol.
After a Jan. 2 phone call with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, Katrina Pierson, a former spokeswoman for Mr. Trump who was helping to organize the rally, sent an email to fellow organizers saying that the president’s expectation was to “call on everyone to march to the Capitol.”
And in a Jan. 4 text message, Kylie Jane Kremer, another rally organizer, said it was important to keep the plan secret to avoid alerting the National Park Service, which issues permits for demonstrations in Washington.
“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.’”
The revelations came as the committee held its seventh hearing digging into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in a mob of his supporters storming the Capitol.
The panel also revealed the following:
Senior Trump administration officials described how Mr. Trump personally sought to use the federal government to seize voting machines in an effort to overturn his 2020 defeat. In videotaped testimony played on Tuesday, William P. Barr, the former attorney general, said Mr. Trump asked him to use the Justice Department to seize machines, a request that he quickly denied. “Absolutely not,” Mr. Barr said he had replied. “There’s no probable cause, and we’re not going to seize any machines.”
Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel who testified behind closed doors on Friday, also recounted how he pushed back against the idea, even as a group of outside allies of Mr. Trump advised that the president do so. “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.
The committee reconstructed an unhinged, hourslong meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, in which Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, the pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and the former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne pressed to seize voting machines and name Ms. Powell as a special counsel to work to overturn the election. When White House lawyers pushed back against the extreme plans, they were told they weren’t “tough enough,” according to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer who attended parts of the meeting.
After the Dec. 18 meeting ended, Mr. Trump sent out an inflammatory tweet, summoning his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 and saying it “will be wild.” The committee showed how far-right commentators and extremists immediately seized on the posting, and encouraged followers to storm the Capitol and commit violence. One called for a “red wedding,” a reference to a scene of mass slaughter in George R.R. Martin's books.
Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, a member of the committee who has developed an expertise on violent domestic extremist groups, laid out what he called “three rings of interwoven attack” that converged at the Capitol on Jan. 6: Mr. Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into overturning the election; the right-wing groups and militias that he galvanized to come to Washington, whose members, in turn, plotted a violent effort to contest the election outcome; and the “large and angry crowd” that Mr. Trump mobilized to march to the Capitol, feeding the mayhem.
The New York Times
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