At the select committee’s first hearing, members mostly took a back seat while airing the testimony from members of Donald Trump’s inner circle.
The Jan. 6 select committee won’t personally tell the story of Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election. Instead, they’re letting Trump’s own aides, confidants and family members do it for them.
The panel made clear at its first public hearing Thursday that it would rather let Trump’s own inner circle stitch together the details of the former president’s actions to remain in power — and his inaction as a mob of supporters overran the Capitol. Videos showed Ivanka Trump, former Attorney General William Barr and Trump campaign advisers testify that the former president had really lost the 2020 election, as committee members mostly remained in the background.
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The panel has for 10 months quietly amassed an enormous trove of video depositions, compiled from its more than 1,000 witness interviews. Now, as Republicans accuse the panel of a partisan witch hunt, members are strategically deploying the audio and video to communicate a simple point: Trump’s own allies believe — and told him — his actions were wrong.
“Don’t believe me?” select committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) intoned roughly seven minutes into the two-hour primetime hearing. “Hear what his former Attorney General had to say about it.”
The subsequent clip — in which Barr described Trump’s claims of election fraud as “bullshit” — marked the start of a cavalcade of video excerpts, showing the former president’s orbit directly contradicting his false claims of election fraud. In one of them, Ivanka Trump said she agreed with Bill Barr’s assessment.
“I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he was saying,” she told the committee.
The panel hinted that there was much more testimony to come. The witness clips they played only amounted to a few minutes in length, serving as more of a table-setter for the five remaining hearings in the next two weeks. The committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), summarized in her opening statement what some of the more explosive clips would show.
“You will hear testimony, live and on video, from more than a half dozen former Trump White House staff, all of whom were in the West Wing of the White House that day,” she said.
“You will hear that President Trump was yelling, and ‘really angry at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more,’” she continued. “And, aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence ‘deserves’ it.”
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- Discussion
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At the select committee's first hearing, members mostly took a back seat while airing the testimony from members of Donald Trump's inner circle https://t.co/C6nW8Oqkfv
— POLITICO (@politico) June 10, 2022
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022
Vice President Pence assumed de facto presidential power on Jan. 6, ordering the National Guard to secure the Capitol. Liz Cheney confirms that President Trump never gave the order.
I'm both glad Pence did and unsettled that America's experience makes such a thing is defensible.— Nicholas Grossman (@NGrossman81) June 10, 2022
Former Trump White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner tells the Jan. 6th Committee he believes repeated threats by White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to resign amounted to "whining" https://t.co/YjEvScXAAd pic.twitter.com/1DN0ZL5FQr
— Bloomberg (@business) June 10, 2022
Liz Cheney alleged that Trump made no effort to deploy National Guard and made no contact with federal law enforcement. Pence assumed the role of executive. If true, and the members who voted to acquit knew this, they abdicated their responsibility to defend the Constitution.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) June 10, 2022
it’s amazing how Trump loves his loyalists until they say or do anything decent-but-inconvenient to Trump, and suddenly the loyalists are weak losers and idiots. pic.twitter.com/mr6iUWwRhJ
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) June 10, 2022
Liz Cheney calls out Trump’s GOP enablers:
“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, that your dishonor will remain.” pic.twitter.com/MYpFSDmcfG
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) June 10, 2022
Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards on Jan. 6: "I'm trained to detain, you know, a couple of subjects and handle a crowd, but I'm not combat trained, and that day it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat." https://t.co/oJAvh5iY6M pic.twitter.com/CdweiL0I0p
— The Hill (@thehill) June 10, 2022
.@RepLizCheney: "Washington set the indispensable example of the peaceful transfer of power. What President Reagan called nothing less than a miracle. The sacred obligation to defend this peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president except one." pic.twitter.com/uzw0FxHTfg
— The Hill (@thehill) June 10, 2022
Nearly 20M watched Jan. 6 hearing: Nielsen https://t.co/Ja7Tzhl8Rp pic.twitter.com/wKZHqgyBo1
— The Hill (@thehill) June 10, 2022
There is no constitutional mechanism that allows Pence to assume command of the army national guard, as alleged. He just assumed that power because POTUS abdicated it. The constitutional order broke down. https://t.co/FajHF8TgzI
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) June 10, 2022
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