The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol released more transcripts Thursday from conversations with people in Donald Trump’s orbit, including those with his eldest son, former White House aides and the former president’s personal lawyers.
Among the 19 new transcripts published on the committee’s website were conversations with Donald Trump Jr., his fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Christina Bobb and his former adviser Stephen Miller.
The panel has now released interviews from more than 100 witnesses, but that’s just a small fraction of the 1,000-plus people the committee questioned during its 17-month investigation into Trump’s role in last year’s insurrection and his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. Moreover, the transcripts are supplementary to the committee’s 845-page final report released earlier this month as it referred criminal charges against Trump to the Department of Justice.
In one notable excerpt from the committee’s interview with Donald Trump Jr., he went into more detail about a text he sent to then-chief of staff Mark Meadows asking him to pressure his father to speak out against the violence underway at the Capitol. Donald Trump Jr. confirmed that he sent those texts but added, “It doesn’t sound like me. ... I imagine I cut and paste it from somewhere.”
When asked why he didn’t reach out to Donald Trump directly, he responded that his father “doesn’t text.”
In another transcript, Bobb recounted a conversation between Donald Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) in which Graham made some troubling comments about proving voter fraud.
“Just give me five dead voters; give me, you know, an example of illegals voting. Just give me a very small snapshot that I can take and champion,” Bobb recalled Graham saying at a meeting four days before the Capitol riot took place.
The transcript from interviews with former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham gives more insight into Trump’s thoughts on Jan. 6. According to her, several people heard the president say while he watched the chaos unfold on the news that the rioters looked “very trashy” but that he liked the fight they were putting up.
Transcripts of the committee’s interview with Guilfoyle, the ex-Fox News host engaged to Donald Trump Jr., revealed she did not understand the “ramifications or what the significance was” of the electoral vote counting going on inside the Capitol during the riot. She also made a racist remark when the committee asked her if she was familiar with Ali Akbar, another name for “Stop the Steal” movement organizer Ali Alexander.
“Isn’t that what terrorists yell?” she asked, referring to his name. When the investigators corrected her, she responded, “No, I think it is,” before saying, “I do not know anyone named Allah Akbar.”
You can access all of the transcripts released Thursday here.