“The dam has begun to break,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., asserted early in the ninth hearing held by the House panel investigating the Capitol riot 18 months ago.
The hearing’s focus Thursday night was on what Donald Trump did and didn’t do at the White House for about three hours as rioters breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the danger to House and Senate lawmakers appeared to grow.
Cheney, the select committee’s vice chairwoman, presided over the nationally televised hearing Thursday night while its chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., out with COVID-19, made his introductory and closing remarks remotely.
“For 187 minutes on Jan. 6, this man of unbridled, destructive energy could not be moved,” Thompson said of Trump.
Thompson said the committee will work through August, with the next committee hearing to be held in September.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., the only other Republican on the panel, said that when the committee releases a final report, it would recommend “changes to laws and policies to guard against another Jan. 6.”
Here are some major takeaways from Thursday night’s hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
1. ‘Don’t Want to Say the Election Is Over’
Some of the most interesting details were not from the Jan. 6-2021 events, but from the Jan. 7 hearing.
The committee played some outtakes of Trump as he recorded a short speech on video at the White House in which he condemned the “heinous” violence of the Capitol riot.
After saying early on that rioters “will pay,” the president declined to repeat a similar line later about “breaking the law.”
“I’m not going to say that. I already said ‘you will pay,’” Trump told aides after he stopped reading the script.
Later, the video shows Trump reading: “But this election is now over. Congress has certified the results.”
He then says to aides: “I don’t want to say the election is over. I just want to say, I just want to say Congress has certified the results.”
Trump goes on to say twice: “My only intention was to ensure the integrity of the vote.” He then pounds the lectern as if angry about reading the line wrong.
2. ‘That Doesn’t Mean He’s the Winner’
Jan. 6 also included audio from Steve Bannon, a former White House top aide before the 2020 election.
Although Bannon’s comments were not transcribed by the committee staff, complete sentences were heard during the hearing and suggested that Trump intended to declare victory regardless the outcome of the election.
“He’s going to declare victory, but that doesn’t mean he’s the winner,” Bannon, also a key adviser in Trump’s 2016 campaign, said in audio that the committee said was recorded four days before the Nov. 3 election.
“That’s the strategy. He’s going to declare himself the winner,” Bannon said. “So when you wake up Wednesday morning [Nov. 4], it’s going to be a firestorm.”
Trump appeared to have an advantage over Biden when ballots in person were counted on election night. However, Biden won the weekend after mail-in ballots had been counted.
Bannon said days before the election that if Trump seemed to be losing on election day, he would make a fuss.
“Also, if Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier because he’s going to sit right there and say they stole it,” Bannon said. “If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy s–t.”
After this audio was played, Cheney said: “Donald Trump’s plan to falsely claim victory, no matter what the facts actually were, was premeditated.”
3. Security Officials Worried
Rioters breached the Capitol as a joint session of Congress met to certify the Electoral College results that would confirm Joe Biden’s election victory over Trump on Nov. 3.
Then-Vice President Mike Pence, who had a largely ceremonial role in accepting each state’s electoral votes, also was in the building.
The hearing featured recorded testimony from officials, whose identities were kept secret to protect them from any retaliation.
One security official explained why the president’s protectors were concerned about Trump’s stated intent to walk to the Capitol with those who attended his rally on the Ellipse south of the White House.
“We were all in a state of shock,” the official said in the video recording. “We all knew what that implicated and what that meant, that this was no longer a rally, that this was going to move to something else if he physically walked to the Capitol.”
Another official, who was on Pence’s security detail, talked in a distorted audio recording about the detail’s growing concern that afternoon inside the Capitol.
“There were calls to say goodbye to family members and so on and so forth,” the official said. “For whatever reason on the ground, the VP detail thought this was about to get very ugly.”
He added: “If they are running out of options and getting nervous, it sounds like we came very close to either [Secret]Service that requires the use of lethal methods or worse. At that point, I don’t know.”
4. ‘What About the President?’
The committee again showed clips from its deposition of Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipillone, with questioning by Cheney.
Cipillone identified several White House staffers who were against the rioters’ expulsion from the Capitol.
Cheney asked: “Who on the staff did not want people to leave the Capitol?”
“On the staff?” the former White House counsel asked.
“In the White House,” Cheney elaborated.
“I don’t know. I can’t think of anyone who didn’t want them out of the Capitol, particularly once the violence started,” Cipillone said.
At that point in the deposition, committee member Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., asked, “What about the president?”
Cheney: “Yeah.”
Cipillone: “She said the staff. So I answered.”
Cheney: “No, I said in the White House.”
After exchanging glances with his lawyer, Cipillone, who has always been careful not share privileged conversations, declined to answer.
“I can’t reveal communications conversations, but obviously, I think–yeah, ” he said.
5. ‘Complete Dud’
Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., whom House Speaker Nancy Pelosi nixed as a member of the select committee, called the panel “a complete dud.”
Pelosi, D.Calif., made an unusual move by blocking Republican appointees for the select committee investigating the Capitol Riot.
Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), House Minority Leader, withdrew the other GOP appointees.
Pelosi also blocked McCarthy’s appointment of Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.
In an interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News Channel during the hearing, Banks was dismissive of the select committee’s most recent hearing.
“The verdict is in. The Jan. 6 committee is a complete dud,” Baks told Hannity. “Remember this was all about blocking Republicans from winning back the House majority and keeping Donald Trump’s name off the ballot when he runs again in 2024.”
Banks also spoke about the committee.
They will end up spending more than $10 million. They’ve interviewed over 1,000 people. They have 100,000 documents that they don’t want to make public. They are doing the best they can.
This is the final event, the prime time hearing. They are doing the best they can. They haven’t proven anything. They have exonerated Trump and his supporters, if anything.
Earlier Thursday, McCarthy noted that Thompson had made pursuing information about Pelosi “off limits.”
6. ‘Pouring Gasoline on the Fire’
After Pence announced earlier Jan. 6 that he would not stop the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory, Trump tweeted at 2:24 p.m. that his vice president lacked the courage to challenge results from some states.
Former deputy White House press secretary Sarah Matthews, who testified live before the committee, recalled Trump’s tweet about Pence.
“I remember thinking this was going to be bad for him to tweet this because it was essentially him giving the green light to these people, telling them that what they were doing at the steps of the Capitol and entering the Capitol, that they were justified in their anger,” Matthews said. “He shouldn’t have been doing that. He should have been telling them to go home and to leave.”
Matthews, who said that she was fired as deputy press secretary on that night, also added Trump:
I’ve seen the impact his words have on his supporters. They latch on to every word and tweet he posts. So, I think that tweeting out the message about Mike Pence was him adding fuel to the fire.
Former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, the other live witness Thursday night, said he also decided to resign after seeing Trump’s tweet about Pence. Cheney said Pottinger was part the Trump administration’s beginnings.
Some rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as word spread outside the Capitol of Trump’s anger with his vice president.
Kinzinger, the only other Republican on the committee assembled by Pelosi, noted a disturbing moment that occurred after Trump’s video message at 4:17 p.m. telling the rioters to go home “in peace.”
As he walked toward the residence, Kinzinger said the evidence showed, Trump told a White House employee: “Mike Pence let me down.”
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