The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attacks on Tuesday played testimony from key witnesses inside the Trump White House about the former president’s role in influencing the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol to disrupt the electoral count. The hearing—which was the committee’s seventh—focused on the period of time between the end of the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 insurrection, when Trump and his allies, failing in their efforts to overturn the election results, began to organize and even direct the dangerous mob to march to the Capitol building and resist Congress’ counting of electoral votes.
The lawmakers showed how Trump himself assembled the group of his supporters, which included disparate far-right extremist and militia elements, such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, as well as other white nationalists. Lawmakers also documented how the former president ignored his own advisers to entertain a plan concocted by a group of outsiders to use national security assets to seize voting machines in the wake of his loss.
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, said that a Trump tweet sent a month before the attack served as a call to action, saying that it “electrified and galvanized his supporters, especially the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight against the government.”
