Trump’s choices set nation on path to Jan. 6 violence, committee shows

In an interview with the Associated Press that day, he offered the country the same conclusion, though in less profane terms: The Justice Department had found no evidence sufficient to overturn Joe Biden’s election win.

Trump could have accepted what Barr later termed “reality.”

But inside the White House, the AP story was met with presidential fury. Sitting inside the ornate West Wing dining room, Trump threw his lunch, shattering a porcelain dish and leaving ketchup dripping down the wall.

That account came from a White House aide who testified to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which over seven public hearings this summer has laid out an elaborate case with a stark conclusion: It was Donald Trump himself who repeatedly set the nation on the path to violence in the weeks after he lost reelection.

At each moment when Trump could have soothed an agitated nation, he escalated tensions instead, the committee has illustrated through its presentation of 18 live witnesses, scores of videotaped depositions and vast documentary evidence. At each moment when longtime loyal advisers offered their view that his election loss was real, he refused to listen and found newcomers and outsiders willing to tell him otherwise.

On at least 15 different occasions, the president barreled over those who told him to accept his loss and instead took actions that sought to circumvent the democratic process and set the nation on the path to violence, according to the committee’s evidence.

The resulting attack on the Capitol was not spontaneous, the committee has argued, but instead a predictable outcome that Trump enabled even after learning the crowd he was addressing that day was armed and baying for blood.

“President Trump is a 76-year-old man — he is not an impressionable child,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, at the panel’s most recent hearing on July 12. “Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.”

Trump, she said, “cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind,” invoking a legal term for a person who can only argue they were unaware their actions were wrong because they purposely ignored evidence to the contrary.

The committee, which interviewed more than 1,000 people in all, has not limited its inquiry to the president, unveiling new information about the cast of characters who enabled some of Trump’s darkest impulses following the election.

There was, for instance, his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who one witness said was intoxicated when he urged Trump to declare victory on election night despite the vote count. (Giuliani denies it.) Or John Eastman, the constitutional scholar, who sold Trump on a theory that the vice president could use the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6 to overturn the election, even while acknowledging to White House lawyers that the move would be illegal and likely rejected unanimously by the U.S. Supreme Court. And then there were the bevy of Republican members of Congress who cheered Trump on before Jan. 6 but then asked him for pardons afterward when the plot to keep Trump in office fizzled.

But again and again, the committee has returned with relentless focus to the commander in chief — his knowledge, his planning, his choices.

Panel leaders have promised to put Trump even more in focus at their eighth hearing on Thursday, to be held in prime time as a finale to their first round of public sessions. This time, the lens is expected to be trained on Trump’s inaction on the afternoon of Jan. 6 while his supporters rampaged at the U.S. Capitol.

On the social media platform Truth Social and in interviews, Trump has repeatedly denounced the hearings as a partisan exercise intended to harm his political prospects and has denied the most damaging revelations lodged against him.

“So the Unselect Committee of political HACKS refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements, refuses to talk of the Election Fraud and Irregularities that took place on a massive scale,” he wrote in a June message.

The hearings are not a legal trial. Witnesses have not been cross-examined, and some have complained the committee has played clips of their words taken from lengthy closed-door depositions without proper context. The committee — composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans, all of whom are sharply critical of Trump — has made no effort to offer potentially exculpatory information.

Still, the evidence put forward by the committee — which includes newly disclosed text messages, internal White House records and accounts from those who have not before spoken publicly — has formed a compelling presentation that in the lead-up to Jan. 6, Trump chose a course that made violence likely, if not inevitable.

‘You see what I deal with?’

The outcome of the presidential election was supposed to be final on Dec. 14, 2020. On that day, electors gathered in state capitols across the country to formally cast their ballots in a reflection of certified tallies of the popular vote.

But behind the scenes, Trump was directing the Republican party establishment to get involved in a plan concocted by a cadre of his legal advisers. The idea was to wrangle Trump supporters to gather in key swing states to cast ballots for him instead. The committee revealed that he called Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to fill her in on the plan.

“Essentially, he turned the call over to Mr. Eastman, who then proceeded to talk about the importance of the [Republican National Committee] helping the campaign gather these contingent electors in case any of the legal challenges that were ongoing changed the result of any of the states,” McDaniel told the committee, in testimony that for the first time connected the president directly to that scheme.

Not all Republicans were sold on continued efforts to overturn the vote. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor on Dec. 15 to declare that “the electoral college has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”

Trump campaign documents show advisers knew fake-elector plan was baseless

Others who had been with Trump until then, including members of his inner circle, privately acknowledged in conversations they later recounted to investigators that the president had lost.

But days later, Trump welcomed into the Oval Office an unvetted delegation of outside advisers pushing a last-ditch plan and outlandish conspiracy theories, including that the election had been stolen by foreign powers via Nest thermostats.

Led by lawyer Sidney Powell and ousted national security adviser Michael Flynn, they met with the president alone for 1o to 15 minutes before White House counsel Pat Cipollone and others who had caught wind of the unplanned gathering rushed into the room.

Punctuated by insults and yelling, members of Trump’s senior staff spent hours trying to persuade him that his visitors were spinning wild tales with little basis in reality. The shouting during the meeting got “completely, completely out there,” testified White House lawyer Eric Herschmann. “It’d been a long day. And what they were proposing, I thought was nuts.”

But Trump was inclined to side with the interlopers over his own staff, intrigued by a proposal to use an executive order to seize voting machines.

“He was very interested,” Powell testified of the president’s reaction to the idea, which, she said, “apparently nobody had bothered to inform…