JANUARY 6th REPORTS: Part 4 — Trump tees up the insurrection

JANUARY 6th REPORTS: Part 4 — Trump tees up the insurrection

As previously discussed in the first parts of our series on the House Select Committee’s January 6th reports, Trump had been planting the seeds of insurrection long before Election Day, 2020, questioning voting methods and machines and fanning the flames with conspiracy theories involving the “deep state.”

After states certified their slates of electors on December 14, the Trump-Giuliani effort to stop certification on January 6 by dismissing electors in several states and replacing them with Trump electors went into overdrive.

This was despite the fact that several key figures in the administration, including Attorney General Bill Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, had warned that these efforts had no basis in fact and ran contrary to the Constitution’s imposed procedures.

As reported by POLITICO, Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL) was the main organizer of opposition to certification in the House, enlisting other House members to join in.

In the Senate, Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) spearheaded things for Trump.

Brooks was bringing numerous people to the White House, including Jim Jordan (R-OH), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), and Marjorie Taylor Greene (currently R-GA) to conspire with Trump, Rudolph Giuliani (serving as his attorney and the head of the new team determined to overthrow the election), attorney Sidney Powell, attorney John Eastman, and others.

Vice President Mike Pence also attended some of these meetings, as did his counsel, Greg Jacob. Yet frustrations grew in the Trump camp when neither Pence nor Jacob would see it their way, despite intense pressure.

The January 6th rally, then, can be seen as part of the effort to convince – or perhaps force – Pence to bend to Trump’s will.

The plan was to either get enough Congresspeople to oppose certification or get Pence to overstep his ceremonial role and dismiss electors – or perhaps both.

And if none of that worked, there was always the mob.

To be clear here, this is not to say that everyone who attended Trump’s meetings was endorsing mob violence.

But it is obvious at this point that Trump himself was willing to use it if it meant keeping him in power, and clearly some others at those meetings were not opposed to it.

The entire matter is reminiscent of a line often (wrongfully) attributed to Al Capone: “You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word.”

If gentle coaxing didn’t work, why not have an angry rowdy mob at Congress’s back?

And so, after these meetings, in the wee hours of December 19, Trump tweeted out his infamous “will be wild” message, along with a video pushing supporters to “fight for Trump.”

As noted in the January 6 Report, this was only the beginning: Trump would send out more than a dozen other tweets urging supporters to join them on the 6th.

“The Committee has assembled detailed material demonstrating the effects of these communications on members of far-right extremist groups, like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and others, and on individuals looking to respond to their president’s call to action,” the report details. “President Trump’s supporters believed the election was stolen because they listened to his words, and they knew what he had called them to do: stop the certification of the electoral count.”

Extremist groups were coordinating.

Oath Keepers leader Kelly Meggs, now convicted of seditious conspiracy, boasted on Facebook after Trump’s “wild” tweet that he was working with the Florida Three Percenters and the Proud Boys to “shut this shit down” – referring to the certification of Biden’s victory.

As these extremists got more and more riled up on social media, Senior Advisor Jason Miller bragged to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in a text, “I got the base FIRED UP.”

Mind you that Miller had previously told Trump that there was no evidence of fraud and that the chances that he had really won the election were extremely slim.

Tips started coming into the Capitol police, the FBI, and the Secret Service that there was considerable danger mounting and that the extremist groups present could be planning to overrun the Capitol.

Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she heard many rumors about the potential for violence and went to talk to Meadows about it, finding him on his phone reviewing incoming messages.

When she asked about what was happening, he said, “Yeah. You know, things might get real, real bad on the 6th.”

John Ratcliffe, the Director of National Intelligence, also told her that things could get extremely violent on that day.

The D.C. Homeland Security office warned as well that there was a plan to “occupy the [Capitol] to halt the vote.”

Trump knew about the danger.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Judd Deere spoke with him on January 5th and later told the committee that Trump went on and on about how fired up the crowd was going to be at the rally.

On the morning of January 6th, he was told that many in the crowd had weapons.

There were magnetometers at the rally and the Secret Service initially confiscated a considerable amount of these weapons, including 269 knives or blades.

But thousands of people remained outside of the inner area, refusing to pass through the magnetometers.

Trump was reportedly furious about this: he wanted pictures of a large crowd in front of him. Yet the Secret Service was concerned about all the guns they knew were out there.

Hutchinson testified that Trump was not concerned about the guns.

“[W]hen we were in the off-stage announce tent, I was a part of a conversation. I was in the vicinity of a conversation where I overheard the President say something to the effect of, ‘I don’t F’ing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me. Take the F’ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the F’ing mags away.’”

This gibes with what Trump said on stage: “I’d love to have if those tens of thousands of people would be allowed…”

The stage was literally set.

Trump went on for over an hour, inciting the crowd to maddening levels. He told them that a fraud had been perpetrated on them and on the nation.

“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules,” he said.

The Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, and Proud Boys all understood what that meant.

In the next installment, I’ll discuss what Trump and other pols did that day to push the angry, armed crowd toward the Capitol.

Keep up with everything by following me on Twitter: @RossRosenfeld. You can also use the hashtag #Jan6Reports. Look for the next update tomorrow.

Ross Rosenfeld

is a news analysis and opinion writer whose work has also appeared in the New York Daily News and Newsweek. He lives in New York.