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TRUMP HID PLAN FOR CAPITOL MARCH ON DAY HE MARKED AS ‘WILD’, PANEL SAYS


NEW EVIDENCE AND TESTIMONY SHOWED THE PRESIDENT’S TWEET PROMOTING A PROTEST ON
JAN. 6 UNITED EXTREMIST GROUPS AND LED TO CALLS FOR VIOLENCE

By Isaac Stanley-Becker
and 
Jacqueline Alemany
 
July 12, 2022 at 7:59 p.m. EDT

A tweet by President Donald Trump encouraging people to come to D.C. and protest
on Jan. 6, 2021, is shown on a screen July 12 as the House select committee
holds a hearing on the attack on the Capitol. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington
Post)
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Donald Trump scrawled the words on Twitter that motivated right-wing extremists
to seek blood on Jan. 6, 2021, and kept secret a plan to direct his supporters
to the Capitol that day, according to evidence and testimony presented Tuesday
at the seventh hearing of the House select committee investigating the pro-Trump
riot.

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The tweet came at 1:42 a.m. on Dec. 19, 2020, after an hours-long meeting with
outside advisers about seizing voting machines that a White House adviser
described in real time as “unhinged.”

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” wrote the president. “Be there, will be
wild!”

The message marked a turning point in Trump’s efforts to stay in power and, in
the telling of Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), “would galvanize his followers,
unleash a political firestorm and change the course of our history as a
country.”

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Notably, the committee member said, the president’s move to advertise a protest
on Jan. 6 caused the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two right-wing extremist
groups that have not historically worked together, to join hands and coordinate
their planning, including with maps of D.C. that pinpointed the location of
police.

The tweet also illustrated, said committee members, Trump’s pattern of
escalating efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power at every moment when
he had an opportunity to dial them down.

That tendency, they argued, reflected his disregard for the advice of his
lawyers. A clip of new testimony from White House counsel Pat Cipollone showed
he was among those pushing back on baseless conspiracy theories launched by
pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael
Flynn, demanding during an extended encounter in the White House on Dec. 18,
2020, “Where is the evidence?”

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And the same impulse has continued to shape Trump’s behavior, claimed Rep. Liz
Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, who said the former president had
recently tried to call a witness in the panel’s investigation. She said the
committee had notified the Justice Department of the episode, promising, “We
will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.”


he Jan. 6, 2021 House committee held its seventh public hearing on July 12
focusing on how President Donald summoned far-right militant groups to D.C.
(Video: Mahlia Posey/The Washington Post, Photo: Demetrius Freeman/The
Washington Post)

As she has throughout this summer’s hearings, Cheney insisted on Trump’s
ultimate responsibility for instigating an insurrection that was built on a lie.
“President Trump is a 76-year-old man,” she said. “He is not an impressionable
child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own
actions and his own choices.”

The committee presented evidence showing that Trump’s tweet on Dec. 19 altered
planning for the protest activity that would ultimately bring deadly mayhem to
the Capitol. Originally, a pro-Trump group called Women for America First had
been preparing for a rally after the inauguration of Joe Biden on Jan. 20. But,
following the president’s tweet, the group changed the permit to Jan. 6,
according to documents displayed by the House panel.

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Among pro-Trump influencers who enjoy broad online followings, the tweet was a
siren. Alex Jones, the far-right host of Infowars, said, “President Trump, in
the early morning hours today, has tweeted that he wants the American people to
march on Washington.” Tim Pool, a prominent YouTuber, said of Jan. 6, “This
could be Trump’s last stand.” And Matt Bracken, a right-wing commentator, became
specific, envisioning “storming right into the Capitol.”

Further afield, the tweet caused violent rhetoric to course through anonymous
pro-Trump sectors of 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, the owner of the online message board where the extremist QAnon
ideology took root, told the House panel he was moved by Trump’s tweet. “When
the president of the United States announced that he was going to have a rally,
I bought a ticket and went.”

Some of the messages were “openly homicidal,” Raskin said, and littered with
racist and genocidal rallying cries. One asked, “Why don’t we just kill them. …
every last democrat ….” Another said, “white revolution is the only solution.”

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A post on a popular pro-Trump forum, thedonald.win, envisioned police officers
“laying on the ground in a pool of blood.” The site’s founder, Jody Williams,
told the committee that the president’s tweet focused attention on Jan. 6.

“After it was announced that he was going to be there on the sixth to talk, then
yes, everything else was kind of shut out, and it was just going to be on the
sixth,” Williams said.

A post on that forum pressed, “JOIN YOUR LOCAL PROUD BOYS CHAPTER AS WELL.”

The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, some of whose members have been indicted on
charges of conspiracy related to Jan. 6, “responded immediately to President
Trump’s call,” Raskin said.

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Kelly Meggs, the head of the Florida branch of the Oath Keepers, took to
Facebook on the morning of Dec. 19 to declare an alliance between the two
groups, writing, “We have decided to work together and shut this … down,” with
an expletive for emphasis.

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Phone records obtained by the committee, Raskin said, show Meggs called Proud
Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who has been indicted on conspiracy charges in the
Capitol attack, that afternoon.

The attack: The Jan. 6 siege of the U.S. Capitol was neither a spontaneous act
nor an isolated event

The next day, the Proud Boys “got to work,” Raskin said, launching an encrypted
chat called the “Ministry of Self Defense,” in which they used maps of D.C. and
other tools to engage in “strategic and tactical planning about Jan. 6.”

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The lawmaker said members of both extremist groups worked with Flynn — the
former lieutenant general who attended the Dec. 18 meeting in the White House
and had been pictured just days before being guarded by an Oath Keeper — as well
as with longtime Trump 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 F.O.S., that Raskin said included Tarrio and Stewart Rhodes, the
founder of the Oath Keepers, among others. In the chat, Rhodes said anyone not
able to travel to D.C. should instead launch protests in their state capitals.
He also called on Trump to invoke martial law, according to video shown by the
committee.

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Flynn did not respond to a request for comment. Stone, in a text message, said,
“Any claim assertion or implication that I knew in advance about, was involved
in or condoned any illegal act at the Capitol on Jan. 6 is categorically false.”
He defended his decision to give a speech on Jan. 5 “consistent with my
constitutional free-speech rights to skepticism about the anomalies and
irregularities in the 2020 election. I am certainly entitled to my apocalyptic
view of America’s future as expressed in my speech.”

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Ahead of Tuesday’s hearing, Trump attacked the committee on Truth Social, the
social media platform developed by his allies after he was banned from Twitter,
saying the investigation was an effort to harm his poll numbers.

Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who co-led Tuesday’s hearing, presented evidence
that Trump planned in advance to direct his supporters to the Capitol but kept
his intentions veiled.

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An undated draft tweet, marked as being seen by the president, promoted his Jan.
6 speech at the Ellipse and concluded, “March to the Capitol after. Stop the
Steal!!”

A Trump campaign spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, wrote in an email after a Jan. 2
call with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that the president’s
“expectations are to have something intimate at the Ellipse and call on everyone
to march to the Capitol.”

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Rally organizers indicated they had advance knowledge that the president would
issue the call at the last minute. “POTUS is going to call for it just
unexpectedly,” Kylie Kremer, a leader of Women for America First and an
organizer of the rally at the Ellipse, wrote in a text message on Jan. 4. She
did not respond to a request for comment.

Ali Alexander, another organizer of pro-Trump protest activity, also exhibited
prior knowledge of the president’s plans in a text message the following day.
“Trump is supposed to order us to the capitol at the end of his speech but we
will see,” he wrote.

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Alexander said Tuesday he could not recall who notified him about the
president’s remarks. “Plans were changing 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 was a deliberate strategy decided upon 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 evidence from the National Archives and witness testimony,
according to Murphy — the images of violence emerging from the Capitol hours
later left some of his former top aides uncomfortable.

Five takeaways from the hearing on extremism and Trump

Brad Parscale, his onetime campaign manager who had stepped away from the
reelection effort, reacted to Trump’s conduct in a text message that evening to
Pierson. “A sitting president asking for civil war,” he wrote.

“If I was Trump and knew my rhetoric killed someone,” he added. When Pierson
pushed back, saying, “It wasn’t the rhetoric,” Parscale replied, “Katrina. Yes
it was.”

Parscale is now advising Trump’s leadership PAC, Save America, and has been paid
$150,000 by the group since he sent 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 dismissing him as campaign manager and thought the president should
have commented hours before he did to tell people to leave the Capitol. The
person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter,
said Parscale has since made peace with Trump. The two spoke Tuesday after the
texts were revealed, the person said, adding that Parscale would be involved in
a prospective 2024 campaign.

Trump’s mood was brightest during the post-election period on the evening of
Jan. 5, 2021, former White House aides told the committee, according to clips
from their depositions. That’s because he could hear his supporters gathering
from his perch in the Oval Office, they said.

Those supporters, said Murphy, “believed him” when he said falsely that the
election had been stolen.

“And many headed towards the Capitol. As a result, people died. People were
injured,” she said. “Many of his supporters’ lives will never be the same.”

One of those supporters, Stephen Ayres, a cabinet maker from Ohio who pleaded
guilty in June to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a
restricted building, testified Tuesday.

He said he marched to the Capitol on the president’s instructions, recalling,
“We basically just followed what he said.” Ayres said he left the Capitol after
Trump instructed the rioters to do so in a video message that also called them
“very special,” and would have gone home sooner had the president asked.



Instead, Raskin said, Trump “became the first president ever to call for a crowd
to descend on the capital city to block the constitutional transfer of power.”

“The creation of the internet and social media has given today’s tyrants tools
of propaganda and disinformation that yesterday’s despots could only have
dreamed of,” he said.

Ayres, asked to reflect on lessons from Jan. 6, said, “The biggest thing for me
is take the blinders off, make sure you step back and see what’s going on before
it’s too late.”

Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.


THE JAN. 6 INSURRECTION

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection held a
series of high-profile hearings in June. The committee’s next public hearing is
scheduled for July 12.

Congressional hearings: The House committee investigating the attack on the U.S.
Capitol has conducted a series of hearings to share its findings with the U.S.
public. The sixth hearing featured explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson,
a former White House aide.

Will there be charges? The committee could make criminal referrals of former
president Donald Trump over his role in the attack, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.)
said in an interview.

What we know about what Trump did on Jan. 6: New details emerged when Hutchinson
testified before the committee and shared what she saw and heard on Jan. 6.

The riot: On Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an
attempt to stop the certification of the 2020 election results. Five people died
on that day or in the immediate aftermath, and 140 police officers were
assaulted.

Inside the siege: During the rampage, rioters came perilously close to
penetrating the inner sanctums of the building while lawmakers were still there,
including former vice president Mike Pence. The Washington Post examined text
messages, photos and videos to create a video timeline of what happened on Jan.
6.

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Jan. 6 committee hearings
HAND CURATED
 * Understanding some of the key disputes over Jan. 6 committee evidence
   
   Analysis•
   
   June 29, 2022
 * What we know — and don’t know — about what Trump did on Jan. 6
   
   News•
   
   June 30, 2022
 * How Trump pressures witnesses to deny his possible Jan. 6 wrongdoing
   
   News•
   
   June 30, 2022

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