Former President Donald Trump reacted to Thursday’s House committee hearing on the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack by issuing an unhinged, 14-page letter Friday repeating the lie that the most recent presidential election was “Rigged and Stolen.”
The “Unselects,” he said, using his term for the bipartisan select committee’s members, sought to “destroy the lives of many hard-working American Patriots,” which is his preferred description for the mob that stormed the Capitol and attempted to disrupt the centuries-old American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.
The letter, posted to his social media platform, did not once address how the committee resolved to subpoena him directly in the final minutes of its public hearing.
Trump wrote the message, he said, “to express our anger, disappointment, and complaint” that the committee ignored his “strong and powerful requests” to examine the “massive Election Fraud that took place.” (It did not, in fact, take place.)
The former Republican president began with a marathon run-on sentence that doubled as a laundry list of his top grievances ― “Radical Left Democrats,” “Russia, Russia, Russia” and “Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine” among them.
In the letter, he drew a false equivalency between the political violence demonstrated by his supporters and the activities of demonstrators involved in the Black Lives Matter movement and various anti-fascist groups.
He mischaracterized a February 2021 Time magazine article, which described how business and community leaders worked tirelessly to make sure that the 2020 election was free and fair.
He bragged about the size of the crowd that showed up to hear him allege ― falsely ― that the election was not free and fair, and he lamented how the “massive size of this crowd, and its meaning, has never been a subject of your Committee.” Trump attached several photos of the crowd to his letter.
He claimed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) failed to call in law enforcement once the riot began, although previously unseen video shown at Thursday’s hearing, and more extensive footage provided to CNN, showed how she had been speaking to then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Vice President Mike Pence, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and others, trying desperately to get law enforcement to the scene that afternoon.
Pelosi and other top lawmakers had relocated in a hurry to Fort McNair, a nearby military base, once Trump’s supporters breached the Capitol ― their anger having been fomented by the president himself.
At Thursday’s hearing, committee members highlighted Trump’s failure to act to quell his supporters. Multiple former staffers testified that Trump had been holed up in front of TV news coverage while advisers tried to get messages to him through Mark Meadows, who was the White House chief of staff.
That much was already known. The committee took time Thursday to add information about how members of the U.S. Secret Service had been aware of the potential for violence in the weeks and days leading up to the Capitol attack. They knew that people in Trump’s crowd were carrying weapons.
The committee aimed to underscore the planning that had gone into Jan. 6, as Trump and those in his orbit began working to convince his base that the election was unfair even before they knew that he lost.
Numerous Trump administration officials, including then-Attorney General William Barr, told the committee that they had explained to Trump why his fraud claims were wrongheaded after the election was called for Joe Biden.
Clips of the officials’ testimony were played at the public hearing. Several former staffers also said they believed Trump knew, privately, that he had lost. Yet those videos contrasted sharply with footage showing Trump making contemporaneous claims about a stolen election ― which he is still making, almost two years on.