Trump sat for hours to watch the attack on Capitol Hill unfold: witnesses in court

Former President Donald Trump sat for hours watching the attack on the US Capitol unfold on live television on January 6, 2021, ignoring pleas from his sons and other close aides to urge his supporters to stop the attack. violence, witnesses said at a congressional hearing Thursday.

The House Committee used its eighth hearing this summer to detail what they said was Trump’s lack of action during the 187 minutes between the end of his inflammatory speech at a rally urging supporters to march on Capitol Hill and the posting a video telling them to go home.

“President Trump sat at his dining room table and watched the attack on television as his most senior staff, closest advisers and members of his family pleaded with him to do what is expected of any American president,” the representative said. Elaine Luria, a member of the Democratic caucus.

Luria said that Trump was watching Fox News for more than two and a half hours and that there is no official record of the former president making or receiving a call throughout the afternoon, and no photos of him until he appeared at the Rose Garden in New York. the White House after 4 p.m.

The panel played videotaped testimony from White House aides and security personnel discussing the events of that day.

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone was asked question after question in testimony about whether Trump took this action or that: Did he call the defense secretary? Did he call the attorney general of the United States? Did you call the head of Homeland Security? Cipollone answered “no” to each query.

Panel members said Trump’s daughter Ivanka and son Don Jr. were among those who pleaded with him to act.

The witnesses were Matthew Pottinger, Trump’s deputy national security adviser, and Sarah Matthews, deputy press secretary at the White House. Both resigned in the hours following the January 6 riot.

“If the president had wanted to make a statement and address the American people, he could have been on camera almost immediately,” Matthews testified. “If he had wanted to make a speech from the Oval Office, we could have assembled the White House press corps in a matter of minutes.”

The committee showed never-before-seen video of Trump saying, “I don’t want to say the election is over,” the day after the uprising on Capitol Hill.

The committee showed outtakes of a speech Trump taped on January 7, 2021, in which he is seen trying to cut several lines from the script that he thought went too far, and resisted the idea of ​​saying the election had finished.

The cutaways show a president unwilling to admit defeat, even hours after his supporters stormed the Capitol to try to stop the vote count.

Committee chairman Bennie Thompson said Trump as president did “everything in his power to nullify the election” he lost to Joe Biden, including before and during the deadly attack on Capitol Hill.

“He lied, he bullied, he betrayed his oath,” said Thompson, D-Miss.

Watch the hearing live:

Luria said nearly everyone around Donald Trump on the day of the riots advised him to order the crowd to disperse from Capitol Hill.

“But the former president chose not to do what all those people were begging him to do,” said the Democratic representative.

“Trump refused due to his selfish desire to remain in power,” he said.

He then played a video that Trump recorded telling the insurgents “we love you.”

After months of work and weeks of hearings, the committee’s co-chair, Liz Cheney of Wyoming, said “the levee has begun to break” in revealing what happened that day, both at the White House and in the violence on the ground. Capitol.

This was likely the last hearing of the summer, but the panel said it will resume in September as more witnesses and information emerge.

“Our investigation is moving forward,” Thompson said, testifying remotely after testing positive for COVID-19.

With Associated Press and Reuters reporting

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