The tweet was posted at 1:42 am. on December 19, 2020, after an hours-long meeting with outside advisers on the seizure of voting machines that a White House adviser described in real time as “inappropriate.” “Big protest in DC on January 6th,” the president wrote. “Be there, it’ll be wild!” The message marked a turning point in Trump’s efforts to stay in office and, as Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said, “would energize his supporters, unleash a political firestorm and change the course of history us as a country.” Specifically, the committee member said, the president’s move to advertise a Jan. 6 protest prompted the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, two far-right extremist groups that historically have not worked together, to join hands and coordinate their planning. including with maps of DC that pinpointed the location of the police. The tweet also illustrates, committee members said, Trump’s pattern escalating efforts to block the peaceful transfer of power every time he had the chance to call for them. This trend, they argued, is being demonstrated with his disregard for the advice of his lawyers. A video 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 meeting at the White House House in December. 18, 2020, “Where’s the Evidence?” And the same has an inclination continued to shape Trump’s behavior, claimed Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chairwoman, who said the former president recently tried to call a witness in the committee’s investigation. He said the commission had informed the Department of Justice about the episode, promising: “We will take any attempt to influence testimony very seriously.” As she has done throughout hearings this summer, Cheney insisted on Trump’s ultimate responsibility for fomenting an insurgency built on lies. “President Trump is a 76-year-old man,” he said. “He’s not an impressive kid. Like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his actions and his own choices.” The panel presented evidence showing that Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet changed planning for the protest activity that would eventually bring deadly chaos to the Capitol. Initially, a pro-Trump group called Women for America First was preparing for a rally after Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20. But, after the president’s tweet, the team changed the license to Jan. 6, according to documents shown by the House panel. Among pro-Trump influencers who enjoy large online followings, 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 of January 6, “This could be Trump’s last stand.” And Matt Bracken, a right-wing commentator, got specific, envisioning “invading the Capitol directly.” Further, the tweet sparked violent rhetoric in anonymous pro-Trump circles of the Internet. “Trump just told us all to come armed,” one message read. Another user said they needed volunteers “for the firing squad.” Jim Watkins, the 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 he was going to hold a rally, I bought a ticket and went.” Some of the messages were “openly homicidal,” Ruskin said, and filled with racist and genocidal slurs. rallying cries. One asked: “Why don’t we kill them. … every last democrat …”. Another said, “white revolution is the only solution.” A post on a popular pro-Trump forum, thedonald.win, envisioned police “lying 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. “Once it was announced that he was going to be there on the sixth to speak, then yeah, everything else was shut down and he was just going to be on the sixth,” Williams said. A post on this forum clicked, “JOIN YOUR LOCAL PROUD BOYS CHAPTER TOO”. The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, some of whose members have been charged with conspiracy related to Jan. 6, “responded immediately to President Trump’s call,” Raskin said. Kelly Meggs, head of the Florida branch of Oath Keepers, 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…” a saying for emphasis . Phone records obtained by the committee, Raskin said, show Meggs calling Proud Boys leader Enrique Tario, who has been indicted on charges of conspiracy in the Capitol attack, that afternoon. The attack: The January 6 U.S. Capitol siege was neither a spontaneous act nor an isolated event The next day, the Proud Boys “got to work,” Raskin said, starting an encrypted chat called “Ministry of Self Defense,” in which they used maps of D.C. and other tools to engage in “strategic and tactical planning for Jan . 6.” The congressman said members of both extremist groups worked with Flynn — the former lieutenant general who attended the Dec. 18 meeting at the White House and I was photographed 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 commission 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 conversation, Rhodes said that anyone who can’t travel to DC should start protests in their state capitols. He also called on Trump to invoke martial law, according to a video shown by the committee. Flynn did not respond to a request for comment. Stone, in a text message, said: “Any allegation or implied allegation that I had prior knowledge of any wrongdoing at the Capitol on January 6th is categorically false.” He defended his decision to give a speech on January 5 “Consistent with my constitutional right to free speech to be skeptical about irregularities and irregularities in the 2020 election. I am certainly entitled to my apocalyptic view of the future of America as expressed in my speech”. Before Tuesday’s hearing, Trump attacked the committee over Truth Social, the social media platform developed by his allies after he was banned from Twitter, saying the investigation was an effort to hurt his poll numbers. Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), who co-chaired Tuesday’s hearing, presented evidence that Trump planned in advance to direct his supporters to Capitol Hill, but kept his intentions under wraps. An undated draft tweet, which the president noted he saw, promoted his Jan. 6 speech at the Ellipse and concluded: “March to Capitol next. Stop the stealing!!” 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 we call on everyone to march on the Capitol.” Rally organizers said they knew in advance that the president would make the call at the last minute. “POTUS is going to ask for it 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. He did not respond to a request for comment. Ali Alexander, another organizer of the pro-Trump protest activity, also testified prior knowledge of the president’s plans in a text message the next day. “Trump is supposed to 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 tipped him off about the president’s remarks. “Plans changed every day,” he said. “We went with the flow and focused on compliance.” But Murphy said “the evidence confirms that this was not a spur-of-the-moment call to action, but rather a deliberate strategy pre-decided by the president.” When he executed that strategy—and with ad-libs instructing his supporters to “show strength” and “fight like hell,” in changes to his prepared speech revealed by evidence from the National Archives and testimony, according to Murphy— the images of The violence emerging from Capitol Hill hours later left some of his former top aides uncomfortable. Five takeaways from hearing on extremism and Trump Brad Parscale, once his campaign manager who had dropped out of the re-election bid, reacted to Trump’s behavior with a text message that night to Pearson. “A sitting president is asking for civil war,” he wrote. “If I were Trump and I knew my rhetoric was killing someone,” he added. When Pierson pushed back, saying, “It wasn’t the rhetoric,” Parscale responded, “Katrina. Yes, it was.” Parscale now advises Trump’s leadership 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 should have commented hours before he said that…
