Former President Donald Trump called Republican senators in a bid to sway them against certifying the 2020 presidential election on the afternoon of Jan. 6 instead of managing the growing crisis at the Capitol, as revealed in Thursday night’s Jan. 6 hearing.
The House Jan. 6 committee played testimony during its eighth summer hearing from former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who said Trump did not make an effort to address the protest that was turning into a riot down the street. According to testimony, Trump instead called senators in a last-ditch effort to delay Joe Biden’s certification as the next president. The committee did not have the identities of these senators, as the calls were not in the official records.
CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION LAUNCHED INTO DELETED SECRET SERVICE JAN. 6 TEXTS
The committee illustrated that Trump would have known that the protest was escalating, pulling footage from Fox News that he was reportedly watching all afternoon that showed the crowd was turning violent.
The focus of this hearing is to piece together evidence that Trump wasn’t trying to deescalate the riot during the 187 minutes between his speech on the White House Ellipse and his video message telling the protesters to go home. None of the records show what Trump was doing during this time frame between 1:10 p.m. and 4:17 p.m.
Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, and Matt Pottinger, former deputy national security adviser, are the star witnesses Thursday night and are relating their experiences of being in the West Wing that day.
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Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) charged Trump with “dereliction of duty” for not upholding his oath to uphold the Constitution, saying in his opening statement that “Trump didn’t fail to act — he chose not to act.”
This is the eighth and final hearing this summer until September, according to Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY).
