WASHINGTON — Sitting with serious faces in sterile rooms answering questions from congressional investigators, ally after ally of former President Donald Trump — his daughter, the former attorney general, a former senior campaign aide — admitted that his claims that the 2020 election were stolen from him were false.
The new testimony was part of an orchestrated launch by the Jan. 6 committee, interspersing never-before-seen video of thousands of hours of sober testimony and the violence that unfolded to build a case that Trump was responsible for the events of the day.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff which I told the president was bullshit,” former Attorney General Bill Barr testified.
In one particularly shocking moment, video of Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, elicited gasps when he explained how after Vice President Mike Pence called pleading for military help to quash the riot, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, called to ask help in dispelling the image that Trump was no longer in charge.
New video was played showing police being brutalized by the mob, airing footage taped by a documentarian that included audio, unlike much of the silent security video aired during the impeachment proceedings.
The committee promised details of a seven-point plan that Trump and his allies developed and implemented in a bid to undermine American democracy that culminated in the deadly riot.
“Jan. 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in his opening statement. “A brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6th, ‘to overthrow the government.’ The violence was no accident. It represented Trump’s last, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”
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The committee has tried for months to keep a close hold on what it was learning through interviews with more than 1,000 people — including with the president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner — and accumulating more than 140,000 documents. Despite leaks, it remained unclear whether the committee was going to make Trump the focus of their hearings.
Thursday removed any doubt.
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the top Republican on the panel, took direct aim at Trump, saying he repeatedly rebuffed pleas by his aides to call off the violent mob attacking police and lawmakers.
“Those who invaded our Capitol and battled law enforcement for hours were motivated by what President Trump had told them: that the election was stolen and that he was the rightful president,” Cheney, the vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, said in her opening statement.
“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”
“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.”
Rep. Liz Cheney said
The committee played short clips of several of the highest-profile interviews it conducted with Trump’s inner circle — including those who remain allied with the president, like Jason Miller.
“I was in the Oval Office,” Miller said in the clip that was played. “At some point in the conversation, Matt Oczkowski, who was the lead data person, was brought on, and I remember he delivered to the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”
Cheney argued that Trump knew he had lost the election but continued to push false claims to try to hold on to power.
Cheney, who was 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after the riot, said future hearings will reveal live and recorded testimony from more than a half-dozen Trump White House aides — all of whom were in the West Wing that day — who pleaded with the then-president to call off the attack, to no avail.
The testimony, Cheney added, will also show that Trump backed his supporters who breached the Capitol and wanted to assassinate Pence.
“President Trump believed his supporters at the Capitol ‘were doing what they should be doing.’ This is what he told his staff as they pleaded with him to call off the mob, to instruct his supporters to leave,” Cheney said.
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“You will hear testimony that ‘the president didn’t really want to put anything out’ calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave. You will hear that President Trump was yelling and ‘really angry at advisers who told him he needed to do be doing something more,’” Cheney said.
“And, aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence ‘deserves’ it.”
Cheney played recorded testimony in which Milley said it was Pence who called him on Jan. 6 asking for help to put down the riot.
Trump didn’t call.
But Meadows did call asking for help to dispel perceptions that it was Pence who was calling the shots.
Milley testified that Meadows said: “‘We have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions. We need to establish the narrative, you know, that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable, or words to that effect.'”
Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, has not ruled out running for president if Trump seeks another bid for the White House in 2024.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
