January 6 takeaways: Donald Trump ‘could not be moved’ amid violence
The House January 6 committee is closing out its set of summer hearings with its most detailed focus yet on the investigation’s main target: former President Donald Trump. The panel is examining Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, as hundreds of his supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol, guiding viewers minute-by-minute through the deadly afternoon to show how long it took for the former president to call off the rioters. The panel is focusing on 187 minutes that day, between the end of Trump’s speech calling for supporters to march to the Capitol at 1:10 p.m. and a video he released at 4:17 p.m. telling the rioters they were “very special” but they had to go home. Trump was “the only person in the world who could call off the mob,” but he refused to do so for several hours, said the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who was participating in the hearing remotely due to a COVID-19 diagnosis. “He could not be moved.” THE WHITE HOUSE DINING ROOM The panel emphasized where Trump was as the violence unfolded — in a White House dining room, sitting at the head of the table, watching the violent breach of the Capitol on Fox News. He retreated to the dining room at 1:25 p.m., according to Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., one of two members who led the hearing. That was after some rioters had already breached barriers around the Capitol — and after Trump had been told about the violence within 15 minutes of returning to the White House. Fox News was showing live shots of the rioters pushing past police, Luria said, showing excerpts of the coverage. In video testimony played at the hearing, former White House aides talked about their frantic efforts to get the president to tell his supporters to turn around. Pat Cipollone, Trump’s top White House lawyer, told the panel that multiple aides — including Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump — advised the president to say something. “People need to be told” to leave, Cipollone recalled telling people, urging Trump to make a public announcement. Trump “could not be moved,” Thompson said, “to rise from his dining room table and walk the few steps down the White House hallway into the press briefing room where cameras were anxiously and desperately waiting to carry his message to the armed and violent mob savagely beating and killing law enforcement officers.” NO CALLS FOR HELP As he sat in the White House, Trump made no efforts to call for increased law enforcement assistance at the Capitol, the committee said. Witnesses confirmed that Trump did not call the defense secretary, the homeland security secretary, or the attorney general. The committee played audio of Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reacting with surprise to the former president’s reaction to the attack. “You’re the commander-in-chief. You’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol of the United States of America. And there’s Nothing? No call? Nothing Zero?” Milley said. As Trump declined to call for help, Vice President Mike Pence was hiding in the Capitol, just feet away from rioters who were about to breach the Senate chamber. The committee played audio from an unidentified White House security official who said Pence’s Secret Service agents “started to fear for their own lives” at the Capitol and called family members in case they didn’t survive. Shortly afterward, at 2:24 p.m., Trump tweeted that Pence didn’t have the “courage” to block or delay the election results as Congress was certifying Joe Biden’s presidential victory. FORMER WHITE HOUSE AIDES Matt Pottinger, who was Trump’s deputy national security adviser at the time, and Sarah Matthews, then the deputy press secretary, testified at the hearing. Both resigned from their White House jobs immediately after the insurrection. Both Pottinger and Matthews told the committee of their disgust at Trump’s tweet about Pence. Pottinger said he was “disturbed and worried to see that the president was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty,” which he said was “the opposite of what we needed at that moment.” “That was the moment I decided I was going to resign,” Pottinger said. Matthews said the tweet was “essentially him giving the green light to those people,” and said Trump’s supporters “truly latch on to every word and every tweet.” ‘WE HAVE CONSIDERABLY MORE TO DO’ At the beginning of the hearing, Thompson and Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, the committee’s Republican vice chair, announced that the panel would “reconvene” in September to continue laying out their findings. “Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued, and the dam has begun to break,” Cheney said of the committee’s probe. “We have considerably more to do. We have far more evidence to share with the American people and more to gather.” Republished with the permission of The Associated Press.
Donald Trump’s attacks seen undercutting confidence in 2020 vote
It was a startling declaration about one of the pillars of American democracy, all the more so given its source. The president of the United States last week publicly predicted without evidence that the 2020 presidential election would be “the most corrupt election in the history of our country.” “We cannot let this happen,” Donald Trump told an audience of young supporters at a Phoenix megachurch. “They want it to happen so badly.” Just over four months before Election Day, the president is escalating his efforts to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote. It’s a well-worn tactic for Trump, who in 2016 went after the very process that ultimately put him in the White House. He first attacked the Republican primaries (“rigged and boss controlled”) and then the general election, when he accused the media and Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign of conspiring against him to undermine a free and fair election. “The process is rigged. This whole election is being rigged,” he said that October when polls showed him trailing Clinton by double digits as he faced a flurry of sexual misconduct allegations. Then, as now, election experts have repeatedly discredited his claims about widespread fraud in the voting process. In a country with a history of peaceful political transition, a major-party candidate’s efforts to delegitimize an election amounted to a striking rupture of faith in American democracy. But to do the same as president, historians say, is unprecedented. “Never,” said presidential historian Douglas Brinkley when asked whether any past U.S. president had ever used such language. “What you’re seeing is someone who’s an autocrat or a dictator in action.” This year, Trump has seized on efforts across the country to expand the ability of people to vote by mail. It’s a movement that was spurred by the coronavirus, which has infected more than 2.4 million people in the U.S. and killed more than 125,000 nationwide. The virus is highly contagious and especially dangerous for older people, who typically vote in higher numbers and have been advised by federal health authorities to limit their interactions with others. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud through mail-in voting, even in states with all-mail votes. Trump and many members of his administration have themselves repeatedly voted via absentee ballots. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from accusing Democrats of trying to “rig the election by sending out tens of millions of mail-in ballots, using the China virus as the excuse for allowing people not to go to the polls.” “People went to the polls and voted during World War I. They went to the polls and voted during World War II. We can safely go to the polls and vote during COVID-19,” he said in his Phoenix speech. Trump’s complaints come as he has been lagging in both internal and public polls. The criticism is seen by some as part of a broader effort by Trump to depress turnout by making it harder for people, especially in cities, to vote safely, and to lay the groundwork for a potential challenge to the results in November if he loses. Trump and his campaign vociferously deny this. Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, said Trump may be trying to preempt the sting of a humiliation if he fails to win a second term. But Zelizer said Trump also appears to be “setting up the foundation for taking action.” “What I do think is very realistic is a replay of 2000,” he said, referring to the legal saga in which the Supreme Court stepped in to resolve a dispute over which candidate had won Florida. Republican George W. Bush‘s ultimate win in the state gave him a general election victory over Democrat Al Gore. If this year’s election is close, Zelizer said, Trump could turn to the courts “and wage a political campaign to say this is being stolen and tie up efforts to count the votes.” Brinkley was even more alarmist, questioning whether Trump would vacate the office if he lost. “Trump is laying down his markers very clearly that he’s not going to leave the White House. I think that he’s just setting the stage,” Brinkley said, to say “‘I’m not leaving. It was a fraudulent election.’” Even barring such an extreme move, Brinkley said the president’s rhetoric undermines public confidence in the electoral system. “It creates mayhem and it breaks the heart of what a democracy is.” Americans already have widespread concerns about the security and integrity of elections. A February poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only about one-third have high confidence that votes in the 2020 election will be counted accurately. Americans’ support for mail-in voting has jumped amid concerns over the virus, with 6 in 10 now saying they would support their state allowing people to vote by mail-in ballot without requiring a reason, according to an April survey. Democrats are far more likely to support it than Republicans, a partisan split that has emerged since 2018, suggesting Trump’s public campaign may be resonating with his GOP backers. White House officials and Trump’s campaign say he has raised the issue because Democrats are trying to use the virus as an excuse to tilt voting rules their way. “I think the president is only talking about this because Democrats have been going around to try to change rules in their favor under the guise of the virus. … This isn’t a fight he picked,” said Trump campaign political adviser and senior counsel Justin Clark. “The coronavirus does not give us an excuse to radically alter our way of voting.” Officials noted Trump has voiced support for the use of absentee ballots when voters have a legitimate reason, although he has not said whether that includes fear of contracting the virus. “Imposing a new voting system in a hurried fashion ahead of November only exacerbates the real, underlying concerns about the security of voting by mail without the proper safeguards,” said White
