The tale of Donald Trump’s attempt to sabotage the 2020 election will not be told by the select committee until January 6. Instead, they’re entrusting it to Trump’s advisors, confidants, and family members.
The panel made it clear at its first public hearing on Thursday that it would rather leave the details of Trump’s actions to stay in power — and his inactivity as a mob of supporters overran the Capitol — to his inner circle.
As committee members generally remained in the background, videos showed Ivanka Trump, former Attorney General William Barr, and Trump campaign advisers testifying that the former president had actually lost the 2020 election.
“These aren’t political voices saying we don’t like Donald Trump,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), one of the scores of Democratic politicians in the audience. “For Pete’s sake, this is his own attorney general, the White House counsel, and his daughter.”
The panel has been discreetly amassing a vast archive of video depositions, assembled from more than 1,000 witness interviews, for the past ten months. Members of the panel are selectively deploying audio and video to emphasise a simple point: Trump’s own allies believe — and told him — that his actions were wrong.
“Don’t trust me?” says the narrator. Approximately seven minutes into the two-hour primetime meeting, select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) intoned. “Listen to what his former Attorney General said about it.”
The following film, in which Barr dismisses Trump’s accusations of election fraud as “bullshit,” launched a barrage of video clips depicting the former president’s orbit clearly contradicting his phoney claims of electoral fraud.
Ivanka Trump stated in one of them that she agreed with Bill Barr’s opinion.
“I respect Attorney General Barr,” she told the committee, “so I accepted what he was stating.”
The panel intimated that there might be a lot more testimony in the future. The witness snippets they showed were only a few minutes long, and they were more of a warm-up for the five remaining hearings in the next two weeks. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo. ), the committee’s vice-chair, described some of the more inflammatory footage in her opening comments.
“You will hear live and on-camera evidence from more than a half-dozen former Trump White House staff members who were all in the West Wing of the White House that day,” she stated.
“You’ll hear that President Trump was ranting and really upset at advisers who told him he needed to be doing more,'” she continued.
“And, mindful of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president said, ‘Perhaps our fans have the correct idea.’ Mike Pence “deserves” the award.”
In deposition clips, Trump’s aides can be seen. On Thursday, campaign advisers Jason Miller and Alex Cannon testified before the select committee that they had persuaded Trump that there was insufficient evidence of fraud to overturn the election results.
According to a previously leaked section of Miller’s transcript, Trump responded to their arguments by claiming that they had overestimated their chances of winning in court.
As committee members gaze on during their first public hearing to discuss the findings of a year-long investigation, a video of former Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon speaking during an interview with the Jan. 6 Committee is aired. | J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press
Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the select committee that during the violence on Jan. 6, Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows urged him to “establish the narrative that the president is still in charge and that things are steady or stable,” according to a previously unreported interview.
“I immediately thought of politics, politics, politics,” he explained.
The panel also showed previously revealed text exchanges from Fox News host Sean Hannity to Trump White House officials after Jan. 6, in which he urged them to help Trump exit the White House without causing further upheaval.
“No more crazies,” Hannity wrote. “There will be no more talk of a rigged election.”
The multimedia-heavy plan is a transparent admission that Congress’ prior efforts to disseminate high-profile inquiry results have frequently failed to resonate with the general public.
The committee stated that it aims to use compelling visuals to highlight the massive amount of evidence they have gathered.
It’s a continuation of their technique, which they did during Donald Trump’s second impeachment hearing, when they broadcast early recordings of the Jan. 6 rioting.
Members of the committee are hoping that relying on former Trump officials and allies would help them persuade undecided voters, who may have tuned out the panel’s probe because it was primarily focused on behind-the-scenes interviews for months.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a committee member, said in a brief interview that using the clips is “extremely significant.” “These are those who the president has appointed… It also demonstrates the president’s, the former president’s, responsibility.”
The first session ended with a video montage featuring a half-dozen members of the Jan. 6 mob, all of whom pled guilty to crimes for their acts that day. All of the defendants who cooperated with the select committee indicated that they went to the Capitol for one reason: to see Trump.
The committee also used Trump’s own comments to make their point, including a September 2020 debate-stage remark advising the right-wing extremist Proud Boys to “stand behind and stand by,” which the organisation misinterpreted as a call to action.
According to congressional and Justice Department investigators, the Proud Boys would eventually respond to Trump’s call for a “wild” demonstration in D.C. on Jan. 6 by becoming some of the major instigators of the day’s most deadly violence.
Read more:-
- Federation President of Bosnia and Herzegovina Faces Sanctions From the United States
- Liz Cheney Believes “People Must Watch” the Hearings on January 6, but the Right-Wing Media Suggests the Opposite
- What Are FTB Liabilities?
The committee also demonstrated how Trump’s tweet attack on his own vice president, Mike Pence, which came only minutes after rioters broke their way into the Capitol, was immediately consumed by the rising mob, exacerbating the violence.
The importance of Pence to Trump’s agenda will be the subject of a whole hearing next week, which will include former Vice President Mike Pence’s former lawyer, Greg Jacob.
Pence’s break from Trump — when he refused to accept Trump’s desire to disrupt or delay the counting of electoral votes — was the topic of yet another video segment on Thursday night, teasing his importance.
