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| Photo Credit: The Associated Press. |
The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot Tuesday accused former President Donald Trump of calling a rally to push his supporters to invade Congress to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory after an “unhinged” White House meeting.
The former
president disagreed with his White House lawyers on a later discarded plan to
seize states’ voting machines.
Trump involved in Witness Tampering
The panel’s
vice-chair said Trump himself had tried to contact a person who was talking to
the committee about potential testimony in a clear case of witness tampering,
according to The Associated Press. The panel also revealed that Trump was so
intent on appearing at the Capitol that his aides secretly planned to hold a
second rally stage there on the day of the attack.
Rep. Liz
Cheney who is the vice chair of the panel said it had notified the Justice
Department that Trump had contacted the witness who has yet to appear in
public, The Associated Press reported.
“We will
take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” said Cheney, a
Wyoming Republican.
Trump advised to seize state voting machines
Tuesday’s
testimony brought out details of a late night December 18 meeting at the White
House with Trump’s private lawyers suggesting he order the U.S. military to
seize state voting machines in an unprecedented effort to pursue his false
claims of voter fraud, according to The Associated Press.
The panel featured
new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, a former Trump White House counsel at
the time of the incidence, recalling the explosive meeting when Trump’s outside
legal team brought a draft executive order to seize the states’ voting machines
– a “terrible idea,” Cipollone said,
“That’s not
how we do things in the United States,” he testified.
In a
separate video testimony, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson called the
meeting “unhinged”.
No Voter Fraud Evidence - Cipollone
Testimonies
also reveal how other White House officials scrambled to intervene as Trump met
late into the night with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, retired
national security aide Michael Flynn and the former head of the online retail
company Overstock.
“Where is
the evidence?” Cipollone demanded of the claims of voter fraud, the outlet
reported.
“What they
were proposing, I thought, was nuts,” testified another official, Eric
Herschmann.
Trump tells supporters to “be wild”
The
following morning Trump made a call for his supporters to come to Washington on
January 6 in a tweet saying “Be there, Will be wild.”
Trump allies planned second stage at Capitol
In a Jan. 4
text message from rally organizer Kylie Kremer to Trump ally Mike Lindell, the
MyPillow CEO, Kremer explains: “This stays only between us, we are having a
second stage at the Supreme Court again after the Ellipse. POTUS is going to have
us march there/the Capitol,” according to The Associated Press.
Kremer
warned that if the information gets out, others will try to sabotage the plans
and the organizer “will be in trouble” with the National Park Service and other
federal agencies.
”But POTUS
is going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly,’” Kremer wrote.
On the
morning of January 5, Trump ally Ali Alexander sent a similar text to a
conservative journalist saying: “Ellipse then US capitol. Trump is supposed to
order us to capitol at the end of his speech but we will see,” according to the
outlet.
The panel
also showed a draft tweet from Trump which was obtained from the National
Archives and never sent, calling on supporters to arrive early for the rally
and expect crowds.
“March to
the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!” the draft Trump tweet said.
Committee
member Murphy said, “This was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather was
a deliberate strategy.”
The next
hearing has been rescheduled for July 21.