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The House select committee’s final hearing on the Capitol Hill insurrection before the midterm elections Thursday used new testimony and evidence to demonstrate how former President Donald Trump knew he had lost the election but still went forward with efforts to overturn the results, leading to the attack on January 6, 2021.
The committee’s hearing used new records obtained from the Secret Service and new deposition footage from former Trump Cabinet secretaries and White House officials to bolster their argument that Trump still remains a danger to democracy heading into the 2024 election.
Here are the takeaways from the committee’s latest January 6 hearing:
Cassidy Hutchinson, the former top aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, provided new testimony to the committee relaying anecdotes of Trump acknowledging he had lost the election.
Hutchinson’s testimony had been some of the most damning against Trump during the summer hearings, as she provided detailed accounts about Trump’s actions on the day of January 6.
On Thursday, the committee showed new video deposition from Hutchinson where she spoke to Meadows about Trump’s January 2021 call where he urged the Georgia secretary of state to “find” the votes he needed to win.
“I remember looking at Mark, and I said ‘Mark, he can’t possibly thing we’re going to pull this off. Like, that call was crazy.’ And he looked at me and just started shaking his head. And he’s like, ‘No, Cass, you know, he knows it’s over. He knows he lost. But we’re going to keep trying,’” Hutchinson told the committee.
Hutchinson also said that she witnessed a conversation between Meadows and Trump where he was furious the Supreme Court had rejected a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election result.
“The President said … something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost,’” Hutchinson said.
In roughly three months since the last January 6 committee hearing, the panel has obtained more than 1 million records from the Secret Service, and the panel revealed some of what they learned during Thursday’s hearing.
While there are still questions surrounding erased text messages from Secret Service agents around the insurrection, the panel obtained messages and emails showing the agency receiving warnings before January 6, 2021, about the prospect of violence, as well as real-time reports of weapons in the crowd ahead of Trump’s speech at the Ellipse.
Days before January Trump’s communication adviser, Jason Miller, boasted to Meadows that he “got the base FIRED UP,” and shared a link to a pro-Trump webpage containing hundreds of threatening comments about killing lawmakers if they went ahead with certifying Joe Biden’s legitimate electoral victory, according to a new text message the panel showed Thursday.
“I got the base FIRED UP,” Miller texted Meadows on December 30, 2020, appearing to take credit for amplifying the violent rhetoric about January 6 that was circulating on the pro-Trump website The Donald dot win.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said in Thursday’s hearing that that the Secret Service received alerts of online threats made against Vice President Mike Pence ahead of the Capitol insurrection, including that Pence would be “‘a dead man walking if he doesn’t do the right thing.’”
On January 6, one Secret Service agent texted at 12:36 p.m., according to the committee, “With so many weapons found so far; you wonder how many are unknown. Could be sporty after dark.”
Another agent responded minutes later, “No doubt. The people at the Ellipse said they are moving to the Capitol after the POTUS speech.”
The committee also revealed new evidence Thursday that Trump had devised a plan, well before any votes were counted, to declare victory no matter what the election results were.
“It was a premeditated plan by the President to declare victory no matter what the actual result was,” committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren said during Thursday’s hearing. “We also interviewed Brad Parscale, President Trump’s former campaign manager. He told us he understood that President Trump planned as early as July that he would say he won the election, even if he lost,” she added.
The committee played previously unseen video from its deposition of Pence’s counsel, Greg Jacob. In the clip, Jacob describes how he and Pence’s then-chief of staff Marc Short had prepared, ahead of time, for Trump to declare victory on Election Night, regardless of the results.
After their conversation on November 3, 2020, Jacob drafted a memo to Short, which the committee said it obtained from the National Archives and presented for the first time on Thursday.
“It is essential that the Vice President not be perceived by the public as having decided questions concerning disputed electoral votes prior to the full development of all relevant facts,” the memo reads.
The committee also revealed new emails conservative legal activist Tom Fitton sent to two Trump advisers a few days before the election. One email contains a draft statement for Trump to declare victory on Election Night.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
Source: CNN
