Donald Trump scrawled words on Twitter that motivate right-wing extremists out for blood on Jan. 6, 2021, and kept secret his plan to march his supporters to the Capitol that day, according to evidence and testimony presented Tuesday at the seventh hearing of the House Select Committee investigating pro-Trump riot.
The tweet was posted at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19, 2020, after an hours-long meeting with outside advisers about the seizure of voting machines, which a White House adviser described in real-time as “not working.”
“Big protest in DC on January 6th,” the president wrote. “Be there, it’s going to be wild!”
The announcement marks a turning point in Trump’s efforts to stay in power and, in the words of Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), “will galvanize his followers, unleash a political firestorm and change the course of our history as a country.”
In particular, the committee member said, the president’s move to advertise a Jan. 6 protest has prompted the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, two right-wing extremist groups that have not worked together in the past, to join hands and coordinate their planning, including with maps of the District of Columbia that indicated the location of the police.
The tweet also illustrated, committee members said, Trump’s pattern escalating efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power at every moment he had an opportunity to muster them.
This trend, they argue, is exemplified for disregarding the advice of his lawyers. A clip of new testimony from White House counsel Pat Cipollone showed he was among those rejecting the baseless conspiracy theories floated by pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, insisting during a lengthy meeting in The White House on December 12. 18, 2020, “Where’s the Evidence?”
And the same there is a slope continued to shape Trump’s behavior, said Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chairwoman, who said the former president recently tried to subpoena a witness in the group’s investigation. She said the commission had notified the Department of Justice about the episode, promising: “We will take every effort to influence testimony very seriously.”
As during hearings this summer, Cheney insisted on Trump’s ultimate responsibility for fomenting an insurgency that was built on a lie. “President Trump is a 76-year-old man,” she said. “He’s not an impressionable kid. Like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and choices.
The commission presented evidence showing that Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet changed the planning of the protest activity that would eventually lead to deadly chaos at the Capitol. Initially, a pro-Trump group called Women for America First was preparing for a rally after Joe Biden’s January 20 inauguration. But after the president’s tweet, the group amended the permit on Jan. 6, according to documents shown by the House panel.
Among pro-Trump influencers who enjoy a large online following, the tweet was a siren call. Alex Jones, the far-right host of Infowars, said: “President Trump in the early hours of this morning tweeted that he wants the American people to march on Washington.” Tim Poole, a prominent YouTuber, said on January 6: “This may be Trump’s last stand .” And Matt Bracken, a right-wing commentator, got specific, predicting a “storm right on the Capitol.”
Further, the tweet sparked a flurry of rhetoric in anonymous pro-Trump circles on the internet. “Trump just told us all to come armed,” one message read. Another user said volunteers were needed “for the firing squad.” Jim Watkins, owner of the online message board where the extremist ideology QAnon took root, told the House panel that he was moved by Trump’s tweet. “When the President of the United States announced there was going to be a rally, I bought a ticket and went.”
Some of the messages were “downright murderous,” Raskin said, and were laced with racism and genocide rallying cries. One asked, “Why don’t we just kill them. … to the last Democrat ….” Another said “white revolution is the only solution.”
A post on a popular pro-Trump forum, thedonald.win, showed police officers “lying on the ground in a pool of blood.” The site’s founder, Jody Williams, told the committee that the president’s tweet gained attention on Jan. 6.
“Once it was announced that he was going to be there on the sixth to speak, then yeah, everything else was kind of off and he was just going to be on the sixth,” Williams said.
A post on this forum was clicked: “TOO JOIN YOUR LOCAL PROUD BOYS CHAPTER.”
The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, some of whose members are indicted on conspiracy charges related to Jan. 6, “responded immediately to President Trump’s call,” Raskin said.
Kelly Meggs, the head of Oath Keepers’ Florida branch, took to Facebook on the morning of Dec. 19 to announce an alliance between the two groups, writing, “We’ve decided to work together and shut this down…” with an expletive for emphasis. .
Phone records obtained by the committee, Raskin said, show Meggs called Proud Boys leader Enrique Tario, who is accused of plotting the Capitol attack, that afternoon.
The attack: The January 6 siege of the US Capitol was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event
The next day, the Proud Boys “got down to business,” Raskin said, launching an encrypted chat called “Ministry of Defense,” in which they used DC maps and other tools to engage in “strategic and tactical planning for Jan. 6.”
The lawmaker said members of both extremist groups worked with Flynn, the former lieutenant general who attended the Dec. 18 meeting at the White House and has been taken just days before being guarded by an Oath Keeper – as well as with Trump’s longtime friend Roger Stone. Both men were pardoned in the final weeks of the Trump administration.
The committee obtained encrypted content from a group chat called “Friends of Stone,” or FOS, which Raskin said included Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, among others. In the chat, Rhodes said that anyone who can’t travel to D.C. should start protests in their state capitals instead. He also urged Trump to invoke martial law, according to a video shown by the committee.
Flynn did not respond to a request for comment. Stone said in a text message, “Any claim or implication that I had prior knowledge that he participated in or condoned any illegal action at the Capitol on Jan. 6 is categorically false.” He defended his decision to deliver the speech on Jan. 5 “in accordance with my constitutional rights to free speech from skepticism about the anomalies and irregularities of the 2020 election. I am certainly entitled to my apocalyptic view of the future of America as expressed in my speech.
Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Trump attacked the commission on Truth Social, the social media platform developed by his allies after he was banned from Twitter, saying the investigation was an attempt to damage his poll results.
Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who chaired Tuesday’s hearing, presented evidence that Trump had planned in advance to direct supporters to the Capitol but kept his intentions veiled.
A draft of an undated tweet marked as seen by the president promoted his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse and ended with “March to the Capitol after. Stop the theft!!”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pearson wrote in an email after a Jan. 2 call with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that “the president’s expectation is that there will be something intimate at the Ellipse and I urge everyone to march to the Capitol.
Organizers of the rally indicated that they knew in advance that the president would call at the last minute. “POTUS is going to call for this out of the blue,” Kylie Kremer, a leader of Women for America First and organizer of the Ellipse rally, wrote in a Jan. 4 text message. She did not respond to a request for comment.
Ali Alexander, another pro-Trump protest organizer, also spoke out advance information about the president’s plans in a text message the next day. “Trump should order us to the capitol at the end of his speech, but we’ll see,” he wrote.
Alexander said Tuesday that he could not recall who notified him of the president’s remarks. “Plans changed daily,” he said. “We went with the flow and were focused on compliance.”
But Murphy said “the evidence confirms that this was not a spontaneous call to action, but rather a deliberate strategy decided in advance by the president.”
When he executed that strategy — and ad-libbed remarks instructing his supporters to “show strength” and “fight like hell,” in changes to his prepared speech revealed by National Archives evidence and testimony, according to Murphy — the images of violence , which emerged from the Capitol hours later, made some of his former top aides uncomfortable.
Five takeaways from the hearing on extremism and Trump
Brad Parscale, his former campaign manager, who had withdrew from the re-election effort, responded to Trump’s behavior in a text message that evening to Pearson. “A sitting president wants civil war,” he wrote.
“If I were Trump and I knew my rhetoric was killing someone,” he added. When Pearson fired back, saying, “That wasn’t the rhetoric,” Parscale responded, “Katrina. Yes, this is it.”
Parscale now advises Trump’s lead PAC, Save America, and has been paid $150,000 by the group since sending those text messages. He declined to comment. But a person familiar with Parscale’s thinking said he was angry with Trump at the time for firing him as campaign manager and thought the president he had to comment hours before he did to say…
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