Jan. 6 rioter, former Oath Keepers spokesman testify in panel's seventh hearing
Updated July 12, 20225:23 PM ET
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Ximena Bustillo
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Stephen Ayres (L), who entered the U.S. Capitol illegally on January 6, 2021, confers with Jason Van Tatenhove (R), who served as national spokesman for the Oath Keepers and as a close aide to Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, prior to their testimony during the seventh hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday afternoon.
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The committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack held its seventh public hearing Tuesday, focusing on the role right-wing extremist groups – such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers – played in planning the deadly siege.
The committee connected the dots between these groups and the effort to overturn the 2020 election – and also
showed how a tweet from former President Donald Trump spurred some in those groups to organize around Jan. 6, 2021.
This story was updated throughout the hearing.
To recap the last hearing and testimony related to extremist groups click here
To read more about a confrontation between outside advisers and White House lawyers that preceded Trump's tweet invitation click here
Update 5:22 p.m. ET
Twitter responds: Twitter issued a response to the claims raised at the hearing that the platform was used by the former president to rally extremist groups on Jan. 6.
"We are clear-eyed about our role in the broader information ecosystem in regards to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, and while we continue to examine how we can improve moving forward, the fact remains that we took unprecedented steps and invested significant resources to prepare for and respond to the threats that emerged during the 2020 US election," according to a Twitter spokesperson in a statement.
The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups were banned from Twitter in 2018 and 2020 respectively, and Proud Boys Chairman Enrique Tarrio had already been permanently suspended long before the insurrection.
The company maintains that it monitored activity both from the former president and his followers in the days leading up to the events, including blocking the phrase #StopTheSteal from use.
The spokesperson noted that there can be difficulty in determining the ways that vague phrases may be interpreted in the absence of law enforcement reporting that provides broader context.
Update 4:24 p.m. ET
The damage inflicted on Jan. 6 persists: Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin stressed that an insurrection is not an abstract idea, but
a very real event with tangible and life-changing impacts. He mentioned that hundreds of people were injured on Jan. 6, including more than 150 police officers — some of whom testified at the committee's first hearing last year and have been present at most of this year's.
U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell listens as Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., talks about his injuries suffered on Jan. 6, as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds a hearing on Tuesday.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Among them is
Sgt. Aquilino Gonell, an Army veteran who spent a year on combat duty in the Iraq war and 16 years on the Capitol police force. Gonnell, who testified before the committee last year, said that nothing he experienced in combat could have prepared him for what he faced on Jan. 6.
Gonell was badly wounded in the attack. As Raskin described it, he was beaten, punched, bushed, kicked, stomped on and sprayed with chemical irritants.
Gonnell described his lingering physical and psychological wounds in an NPR interview on the one-year anniversary of the riot. He
returned to work after 10 months in an administrative position because he still couldn't raise his left arm, and has been in therapy for his mental health.
In the committee's first hearing on July 27, 2021, Gonell said he had
sustained injuries on both of his hands, his left shoulder, left calf and right foot. He underwent bone fusion surgery on his right foot and had just learned he needed surgery on his left shoulder."I've been on medical and administrative leave for much of the past six months, and I expect to need further rehabilitation for possibly more than a year," he said.
Raskin provided an update on Tuesday:
On June 28, Gonell's medical team told him that the permanent injuries he suffered to his left shoulder and right foot will make it impossible for him to continue in police work."Sgt. Gonell, we wish you and your family all the best, we are here for you, we salute you for your valor, your eloquence and your beautiful commitment to America," an audibly emotional Raskin said. Then he added:
"I wonder what former President Trump would say to someone like Sgt. Gonell, who must now go about remaking his life. I wonder if he could even understand what motivated a patriot like Sgt. Gonell."
U
pdate 4:15 p.m. ET
Trump tried to call a committee witness, Cheney says: President Trump attempted to call a witness in the Jan. 6 investigation following the last hearing on June 28 with Cassidy Hutchinson, House Jan. 6 committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney said in her closing statement.
Cheney said it was a witness who has yet to appear in the hearings and didn't take the call but alerted their lawyer, who told the committee. Cheney said the committee supplied the information to the Justice Department.
"We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously," she said.
Update 3:46 p.m. ET
Trump's former campaign manager blamed his rhetoric: The impact of Trump's speech at the ellipse was apparent to his former campaign manager Brad Parscale, according to copies of texts he exchanged with rally organizer Katrina Pierson on the evening of Jan. 6.
He described the situation as "a sitting president asking for civil war," adding that "This week I feel guilty for helping him win" in 2016.
Pierson responded that he did what he felt right at the time, to which Parscale replied, "Yeah. But a woman is dead."
"If I was Trump and knew my rhetoric killed someone," he later wrote. Pierson responded that it wasn't the rhetoric.
"Katrina," he texted. "Yes it was."
Update 3:42 p.m. ET:
Trump's last-minute speech revisions escalated tensions: The committee reconstructed how Trump edited his Ellipse speech up until the last minute and then went off-script, based on documents from the National Archives and testimony from witnesses.
Trump made changes to the script the night before and the morning of Jan. 6, according to Rep. Stephanie Murphy. One of his first changes was to insert the lines "Together we will stop the steal," and "All of us ... here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats. Our country has had enough, we will not take it anymore."
The next morning, he spoke to chief speechwriter Stephen Miller for nearly half an hour, after which he inserted this line: "We will see whether Mike Pence enters history as a truly great and courageous leader. All he has to do is refer the illegally submitted electoral votes back to the states that were given false and fraudulent information where they want to recertify."
Speechwriters cut that line after then-Trump senior adviser Eric Herschmann and others objected to it. But later that morning, after the famously tense phone call in which Trump pressured Pence not to certify the election results — and erupted in anger when Pence refused — speechwriters were instructed to "reinsert the Mike Pence lines," Murphy said.
Trump made changes to his speech even as he delivered it, ad-libbing references to fighting and the need for people to have courage and be strong. The word "peacefully" was in the written version and used only once, Murphy pointed out, adding that this rhetoric stoked tensions and riled up supporters even more.
"A single scripted reference in the speech to Mike Pence became eight, a single scripted reference to rally-goers marching to the Capitol became four, with President Trump ad-libbing that he would be joining the protesters at the Capitol."
Update 3:30 p.m. ET:
Trump's intent to call for the march to the Capitol was a secret: Rep. Stephanie Murphy expanded on the committee's case showing that Trump and some White House officials knew about the potential for violence on Jan. 6 but didn't attempt to cancel or modify their plans.
They aired testimony from Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign spokesperson and an organizer of the Jan. 6 rally. She grew increasingly apprehensive after learning that the proposed speaking lineup included far-right activists including Roger Stone, Infowars founder Alex Jones and "Stop the Steal" founder Ali Alexander.
She reached out to Meadows on Jan. 2, writing that "Things have gotten crazy and I desperately need some direction." Phone records show Meadows called her eight minutes later. Pierson recounted that she had expressed her concerns to Meadows, mentioning the heated rhetoric of Jones and Alexander in particular and noting that they had already entered the Georgia state capitol to protest results of the 2020 election.
Despite such concerns, White House officials and rally organizers did not modify their plans or attempt to lower the temperature among Trump supporters. Murphy presented evidence showing that Trump had decided to call on protesters to march to the Capitol, but chose not to announce it until his speech on the morning of Jan. 6.
Pierson wrote in an email that Trump's plan was to hold an "intimate" rally at the Ellipse before calling on everyone to march to the Capitol. And the committee obtained access to a draft tweet telling people to arrive early and march to the Capitol after — which the president saw but never sent. It also showed texts from two people involved in the rally to others, saying that there were plans to order protesters to march to the Capitol, but that they had to be kept under wraps.
The committee showed an undated draft tweet that went unsent from Trump where he would have publicly said that there would be a march to the Capitol and a text message from rally organizer Kylie Kramer on Jan. 4 in which she told My Pillow CEO and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell that Trump would "call for it unexpectedly" but that they didn't want word to get out so there wouldn't be a counter march. A Jan. 5 text from rally organizer Ali Alexander said to be to a conservative journalist that said Trump intended to call on supporters to march to the Capitol.
Murphy painted Trump's speech as "not a spontaneous call to action, but a deliberate strategy decided upon in advance by the president."