House Select Committee Investigating Trump’s Insurrection on Jan. 6 Provides Clear Evidence of Trump’s Culpability in Seventh Hearing –
By Glynn Wilson –
The obvious seditious conspiracy to halt the Electoral College vote certification on January 6, 2021, and to break the peaceful transfer of power for the first time, was planned and incited by Donald Trump, president and commander-in-chief. This became clear as day on Tuesday in evidence and testimony presented to the country by the Select House Committee investigating the Capitol attack and insurrection. Trump and his team of right-wing, white nationalist domestic terrorist groups, corrupt lawyers and other organizers of the planned insurrection kept the details top secret in advance of their plan to attack and enter the Capitol.
According to documents obtained and turned over to the committee by the National Archives, 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 expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!”
The tweet was never sent, to protect the secrecy of the conspiracy and to keep the information from the National Park Service, which had issued a permit for the “Stop the “Steal” rally on the National Mall. But the evidence clearly shows that Trump let his co-consprators know in advance that his plan was to direct the crowd to the Capitol, and to make it look spontaneous.
After a phone call with Mark Meadows on Jan. 2, Katrina Pierson, the White House chief of staff and former spokesperson for Trump who was helping to organize the rally, sent an email to fellow organizers saying that president’s expectation was to “call on everyone to march to the Capitol.”
Kylie Jane Kremer, another rally organizer, sent out a text to the inside group on Jan. 4 explaining why it was important to keep the plan secret, to avoid alerting the National Park Service.
“This stays only between us, we are having a second stage at the Supreme Court again after the ellipse,” 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 ‘unexpectedly.’”
In the hours after Trump’s public tweet saying it was going to be “wild,” the committee showed, one pro-Trump group, Women for America First, requested to move their rally permit from Inauguration Day, on Jan. 22, to Jan. 6.
The next day, Ali Alexander, the leader of the Stop the Steal organization and organizer of its Jan. 6 rally, registered wildprotest.com and began using it to recruit and inform people about the plan to attack the Capitol. Trump supporters, including right-wing talk show host Alex Jones, said Jan. 6 was to be a “historic day.” And numerous others chimed in with violent threats: “Jan. 6, kick that fucking door open.” “It ‘will be wild’ means we need volunteers for the firing squad.”
These revelations came as the committee held its seventh hearing digging into Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election and illegally hold onto power. If successful, he would have taken over the United States as America’s first dictator, like his friend Vladimir Putin in Russia.
The Main Factual Revelations
Senior Trump administration officials described how Trump personally sought to use the executive branch of the federal government, the Department of Justice and Homeland Security, to seize voting machines in an effort to fraudulently change votes and seize the election, to in fact steal the election he was accusing the other side, falsely, of stealing.
In videotaped testimony, former Attorney General William Barr said Trump asked him to use the Justice Department to seize machines, a request that he categorically denied.
“Absolutely not,” Barr said he replied. “There’s no probable cause, and we’re not going to seize any machines.”
Pat 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 Trump advisers told the president to do it.
“To have the federal government seize voting machines? That’s a terrible idea for the country,” Cipollone testified. “That’s not how we do things in the United States.”
White House Meeting
The committee reconstructed an unhinged, shouting match of a meeting in the White House on Dec. 18, 2020, in which Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne pressed to seize voting machines and name Powell as a “special counsel” to work to change the outcome of the election. When White House lawyers pushed back against the extreme plans, they were told they weren’t “tough enough,” according to Rudi Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who attended the meeting.
After that meeting ended, that’s when Trump sent out an inflammatory tweet, summoning his supporters to Washington, 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 books.
At one point the committee suggested that Trump was attempting to interfere with witnesses involved in the investigation. Vice Chair Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican, said they have information proving that Trump called one unnamed witness who declined to take the call. Cheney said the committee has referred the matter to the Justice Department.
“We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” she said.
Other Revealing Details
Six months after he had been summarily removed as the manager of the campaign he helped build, Brad Parscale watched the aftermath of the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and texted a colleague.
“This is about Trump pushing for uncertainty in our country,” Parscale told Katrina Pierson, another Trump adviser and one who had warned other officials ahead of the event about some of the people appearing at Trump’s rally.
“A sitting president asking for civil war,” Parscale wrote. He ran Trump’s digital campaign in 2016.
“This week I feel guilty for helping him win,” he said. “You did what you felt right at the time and therefore it was right,” Pierson replied. “Yeah,” Parscale said. “But a woman is dead,” prompting Pierson to reply, “You do realize this was going to happen.”
“Yeah. If I was trump and knew my rhetoric killed someone,” Parscale said, to which Pierson replied: “It wasn’t rhetoric.”
“Katrina,” Parscale said. “Yes it was.”
Parscale’s texts were coming after a long and complicated history with Trump. The former president fired Parscale. Then in September 2020, he had a personal breakdown. Police were called to his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where his wife told officers he was inside the house, ranting, acting erratically, with a loaded and cocked gun. He was hospitalized and then worked to move on by restarting his political consulting firm, Parscale Strategy.
His raw missives reflected a sentiment that many other Trump advisers, privately and publicly, described having as they watched the events of that day. Several Cabinet officials resigned, and former officials issued statements condemning what had taken place.
But few officials were as interwoven with Trump’s political operation, and his rhetoric about “fighting,” as Parscale, who is still deeply involved with Trump’s operation. His company powers Trump’s email blasts. He helped create Trump’s online fund-raising campaigns that have raised millions of dollars from his supporters, potentially in violation of campaign finance laws.
People close to Trump, who often punishes people for speaking out against him, grumbled privately, according to people familiar with his comments, about the text messages after they were shown. But given how entangled Parscale is with his political operation, it remains to be seen whether there will be fallout.
Willful Blindness
In directly tying Trump to the most violent extremists leading the Capitol attack, the committee made it clear that Trump knew what he was doing, and should be held accountable.
Trump cannot escape responsibility by arguing he is “willfully blind,” according to a statement by Cheney. He “is not an impressionable child” she said.
Did Trump know he lost the election and lie about it anyway, or was he deluded into thinking he won?
The committee thinks it’s the former, she said, but either way, they’re pushing for him to be prosecuted for claiming widespread election fraud and inciting an insurrection.
Cheney acknowledged that some of Trump’s defenders have argued that he was misled by others, obviously trying blame low level players as scapegoats.
“The strategy is to blame people his advisers called ‘the crazies’ for what Donald Trump did,” Cheney said. “This, of course, is nonsense. President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices. … Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by arguing he is willfully blind.”
“Willfully blind” is a legal term. “As recently as 2011, the Supreme Court has reiterated that people who choose to remain willfully blind ‘are just as culpable as those who have actual knowledge’.”
If the committee can’t prove Trump knowingly lied to stay in power, then it appears they will try to prove he chose to look the other way when presented with facts and evidence that he lost the election. It appears the committee is setting the stage for referring Trump to the Justice Department for prosecution, as indicated by Cheney in a recent interview on ABC.
Mass Radicalization
The committee seems particularly interested in unraveling the origins of the mass radicalization of those who followed Trump down the revolution rabbit hole, which manifested in the most serious attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812.
Stephen Ayres, who later pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct related to his activities on Jan. 6, talked about how social media and particularly Trump’s rhetoric led him to believe the election was stolen — and that he needed to leave his home in Ohio to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C.
“I was pretty hardcore into social media,” he said.
“I was hanging onto every word he was saying,” he later added.
Ayres said that if he had known Trump was repeatedly told by White House advisers that there was no evidence that the election was stolen, it would have changed his calculus: “I may not have come down here,” he said, under questioning from Cheney.
When he arrived on the Ellipsis, Ayres said, he didn’t plan to march to the Capitol. But he got riled up by Trump repeating his greatest hits about the election being stolen — rhetoric that was familiar to Ayres from Trump’s tweets — and followed what the president said to do.
“I’m angry,” he said, remembering how he felt in that moment. He said he decided to leave only after Trump tweeted for his supporters to go home — hours after the attack began.
The committee also questioned Jason Van Tatenhove, former spokesman for the right-wing militia group the Oath Keepers. He is now a critic of the organization, and testified that groups such as the Oath Keepers thrive off propaganda, particularly “the swaying of people who may not know better through lies and rhetoric and propaganda that can get swept up in these moments. And I’ll admit, I was swept up at one point as well.”
He said he fears the alliance between Trump and the Oath Keepers and the damage they caused is not over.
“I think we’ve gotten exceedingly lucky that more bloodshed did not happen,” he said. “I do fear for this next election cycle, because who knows what that might bring — if a president that’s willing to try to instill and encourage to whip up a civil war among his followers, using lies and deceit and snake oil and regardless of the human impact, what else is he going to do if he gets elected again?”
Closing Statement
Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat on 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: Trump’s effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into overturning the election; the right-wing groups and militias that he galvanized to come Washington, whose members plotted a violent effort to contest the election outcome; and the “large and angry crowd” that Trump mobilized to march to the Capitol.
In a stirring closing statement after leading much of the questioning, Raskin cited Trump’s dark inaugural address, when he introduced “one commanding image,” he said, of “American carnage.”
“It turned out to be an excellent prophesy of what his rage would come to visit on our people,” he said. “American carnage. That’s Donald Trump’s true legacy. His desire to overthrow the people’s election and seize the presidency, interrupt the counting of Electoral College votes for the first time in American history. He nearly toppled the Constitutional order and brutalized hundreds and hundreds of people.”
“The Watergate break-in was like a Cub scout meeting compared to this assault on our people and our institutions,” he continued.
“The critical thing is the next step. What this committee, what all of us will do, to fortify our democracy, against coups, political violence, and campaigns to steal elections away from the people.”
He said Trump is still calling his insurrection the real election, and he said this is not the problem of one party.
“It is the problem of the whole country now. American democracy … is a precious inheritance. Something rare in the history of the world, even on Earth today. Constitutional democracy is the silver frame, as Lincoln put it, upon which the golden apple of freedom rests. We need to defend our democracy and our freedom with everything we have, and declare that this American carnage ends here and now! In a world of surging authoritarianism, racism and anti-semitism, let’s all hang tough for American democracy.”
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