Perhaps the most damning/horrifying revelation: Trump didn’t make his Rose Garden appearance (at 4:03pm) until AFTER it was clear that the insurrection wouldn’t succeed—the military had been mobilized and the lawmakers had made it to safety.
In today’s hearing, every witness on record describing Trump’s Jan. 6 conduct—Pottinger, Matthews, Milley, Cipollone, Kushner, Deere, Luna, Murtaugh, Miller, McEntee—is a Trump appointee. A damning portrait from everyone around him that day. #Jan6thHearings
O’Brien accepted Pottinger’s resignation but asked him to stay on site until O’Brien had returned to the White House. Pottinger: “I ended up staying at my desk through the night.”
Matt Pottinger on Jan. 6: “It emboldened our enemies by giving them ammunition to feed a narrative that our system of government doesn’t work, that the United States is in decline. China, the Putin regime in Russia, Tehran—they’re fond of pushing those kinds of narratives.”
White House staff had a speech ready for Trump to give on the morning of Jan. 7. Luria says he grudgingly agreed to record the speech that evening — only under threat of removal under 25th Amendment.
Outtakes from Trump’s Jan. 7 address are revealing. “I don’t want to say the election’s over,” he said, almost pleadingly.
Pottinger: “If you continue to contest an election…you’re actually challenging the Constitution itself, you’re challenging the societal norms that allow us to remain unified.” Cites Nixon conceding in 1960, Gore in 2000.
Kinzinger: “Whatever you think about the outcome of the election, we as Americans must agree on this: Donald Trump’s conduct on Jan. 6 was a supreme violation of his oath of office and a complete dereliction of his duty to our nation. It is a stain on our history.”
Kinzinger: “The militant, intolerable ideologies, the militias, the alienation and the disaffection, the weird fantasies and disinformation—they’re all still out there, ready to go.” Warns that our democratic experiment “will not endure” unless rule of law is affirmed.
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