Liz Cheney Ends January 6th Committee Hearing With A Warning: “We Cannot Abandon The Truth And Remain A Free Nation”

UPDATED: In her closing remarks Thursday, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that “Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office.”

The committee went all in on the use of often harrowing – and at times humorous – video and audio clips, some of which quickly went viral and will likely be replayed in the next news cycle. They all were directed at the hearing’s main narrative: “Well aware of what was happening, Donald Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home. He chose not to act,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) at the start of the hearing.

More from Deadline

• Pulitzer Board Refuses Donald Trump's Request To Rescind Prizes To Washington Post, New York Times For Russian Interference Coverage

• Steve Bannon Found Guilty After Trial On Contempt Of Congress Charges

• Raw Video Shows Trump Ad-Libbing Statements To His Supporters On Jan. 6 & 7: "I Don't Want To Say, 'The Election Is Over'"

Raw Video Shows Trump Ad-Libbing Statements To His Supporters On Jan. 6 & 7: “I Don’t Want To Say, ‘The Election Is Over'”

The 2 1/2-hour hearing filled in some of the gaps of what Trump was doing during that period, as he watched Fox News from the West Wing dining room. As advisers urged him to call off the mob, he ignored their pleas, and instead sent out a tweet inflaming the situation.

The hearing highlighted previously released texts that Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham sent to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, urging him to get the president to say something. The committee also highlighted what Fox News was showing at the time, in an effort to show what Trump would have been seeing on his White House screen. That included a moment when House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called into the channel and talked about his conversation with Trump and urging him to make a statement to “calm individuals down.”

According to live testimony and taped segments, though, Trump resisted. Kayleigh McEnany, the White House Press Secretary, told Sarah Matthews that Trump refused to mention “peace” in a tweet as a way of quelling the rioters, Matthews told the committee. According to Rep. Jaime Herrera Butler (R-WA), McCarthy said that Trump told him, “Well, Kevin, I guess they’re more upset about the election theft than you are.”

As the crowd was sacking the Capitol, Trump made calls to lawmakers favorable to his election challenge. That evening Rudy Giuliani, his lawyer, also began to make calls, including one to Sen. Tommy Tuberville that didn’t even mention what happened that day. “We need you, our Republican friends, to just slow it down,” Giuliani said in a voicemail message regarding the electoral vote process.

The committee played audio of Vice President Mike Pence’s Secret Service detail at the Capitol, with serious concerns of being able to evacuate him as he was becoming the target of the mob. But security officials also worried about their own safety and “there were calls to say goodbye to family members, and so on and so forth,” according to a White House official whose voice was altered.

Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that in conversations with Pence that day, the vice president was “very explicit” and gave “very direct unambiguous orders,” working to resume the electoral vote count. Milley said that Meadows called him and “said we have to kill the narrative that the Vice President is making all the decisions. We have to establish the narrative that the president is still in charge.”

“I don’t do political narratives,’ Milley told the committee. He said that, even as the Capitol was under attack, Trump never contacted him.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, said in his video deposition that as the mob was storming the Capitol, he “heard my phone ringing, turned the shower off, saw it was Leader McCarthy, who I had a good relationship with.” McCarthy was pleading for help, Kushner said. “He was scared, yes,” Kushner said. Social media keyed in on the fact that Kushner was taking a shower at the time of the riot.

The big moment of levity was the clip of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), hours after showing his solidarity to the protesters outside the Capitol, running from the Senate chamber as the mob approached. The clip got laughs in the Cannon Caucus Room – as expected.

Matt Pottinger, who resigned as deputy national security adviser on January 6, said in his live testimony that the chaos helped embolden U.S. adversaries to make the claim that the U.S. system of government doesn’t work, while allies “were concerned about the health of our democracy.”

In her closing remarks, Cheney highlighted the fact that so many of the committee’s witnesses were not just Republicans, but faithful members of the Trump team, many of them startled by what they saw unfold from Election Day to January 6. That is one of the biggest revelations to come out of these series of hearings, that so many people in the Trump circle knew that his claims of election fraud were bogus and that his efforts to overturn the results were alarming.

She also put the committee’s work in the context of history, singling out women who testified, including Cassidy Hutchinson. “She knew all along she would be attacked by president trump and the 50-, 60- and 70- year old men who hide behind executive privilege.”

She also warned of what was at stake.

“We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation,” Cheney said.

PREVIOUSLY: The committee played never-seen video outtakes of Donald Trump’s speech the day after the Capitol siege, as Trump, after much delay, admitted that there would be a presidential transition.

In the raw footage, Trump is shown objecting to a line in the speech: “I don’t want to say the election is over. I just want to say Congress has certified he’d results without saying the election is over, okay,” Trump said.

Trump has continued to insist the election was stolen from him.

PREVIOUSLY: “He put a target on his own vice president’s back,” said January 6th Committee member Elaine Luria (D-VA), as she went through a harrowing timeline in which Mike Pence was rushed off the Senate floor and then to a security location as the mob approached.

The hearing featured audio of Pence’s Secret Service detail, scrambling to determine what to do as rioters entered the Capitol and made their way to the Senate chamber. “If we lose any more time, we may lose the ability to leave,” one officer was heard saying.

White House national security officials, meanwhile, were aware of the transmissions. A 2:18 PM note in the National Security Council chat log read, “Decision in the next 2-3 mins or they may not be able to move. VP may be stuck at the Capitol.”

Staffers urged Trump to make a statement to tell the crowd to go home. His son, Donald Trump Jr., texted to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, “This his (sic) one you go to the mattresses on. They will try to f— his entire legacy on this if it gets worse.” Trump’s son told the committee that “go to the mattresses’ was a Godfather reference.

“The staff repeatedly came into the room to see him and plead that he make a strong public statement condemning the violence and instructing the mob to leave the Capitol,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL).

Instead, Trump, in the dining room watching Fox News, tweeted at 2:24 PM that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

One unnamed employee testified that White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, “The president didn’t want anything done.” Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews that Trump “did not want to mention any sort of peace” in his tweet, according to Matthews’ live testimony.

Other senators were being evacuated. There were loud laughs in the hearing room when the committee showed a photo of Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), raising his fist in support of protesters earlier that day. But then they showed another clip of Hawley running out of the Senate chamber as the mob approached. “Senator Hawley fled after these protesters he helped to rile up stormed the Capitol. See for yourself,” Luria said.

PREVIOUSLY: Two other witnesses have corroborated one of the most vivid revelations that has come out of the hearings: Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that Donald Trump had a confrontation with a Secret Service agent, demanding that they take him to the Capitol after he gave his speech at the Ellipse.
“The president was upset and was adamant about going to the capitol and there was a heated discussion about that,” said Mark Robinson, a retired DC police officer who was with a Secret Service agent in the lead vehicle that day.

An unnamed witness, described as a White House employee with national security responsibilities, told the committee that there was a “heated discussion” between the president and his security detail. They did not say anything about another aspect of Hutchinson’s testimony — that Trump lunged in an attempt to grab the steering wheel. Trump has denied the claim.

PREVIOUSLY: The January 6th Committee promised another hearing of new revelations about what Donald Trump was doing for the 187 minutes it took him to urge the mob that stormed the Capitol to go home, as members sought to characterize the then-president as derelict in his duty.

“He refused to defend our nation and our Constitution,” said Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the committee’s vice chair. “He refused to do what every president must.”

The committee’s latest hearing was scheduled in primetime, building anticipation that this will akin to a season finale, with plans to reconvene in September. A reason: More new information is coming in.

“Doors have opened, more subpoenas have been issued and the damn has begun to break,” Cheney said.

Reporters were expecting the committee to lay out a case that Trump did little to try to stop the storming of the Capitol — as he called those engaged in the siege as “great patriots.” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), a committee member, released a video earlier on Thursday featuring snippets of Trump aides, in their video depositions, recalled that Trump was watching TV in a West Wing dining room as the violence unfolded.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS), appearing virtually after testing positive for Covid, opened the hearing and said that Trump “could not be moved to rise from his dining room table” to make a statement at the White House briefing room.

“For 187 minutes on January 6th, this man of unbridled destructive energy could not be moved,” Thompson said.

Matt Pottinger, who served as deputy national security adviser, and Sarah Matthews, deputy press secretary, are scheduled to give live testimony. They were among the administration officials who resigned in protest on January 6th.

Using TV production techniques, the committee laid out its case as a narrative spread out over eight hearings.

Several hours before the hearing came some pushback from a White House figure on what she was doing that day — former First Lady Melania Trump. She told Fox News Digital that she was “fulfilling” her official duties as the siege transpired, and that she would have denounced the violence had she been fully informed of what was happening.

“I was fulfilling one of my duties as First Lady of the United States, and accordingly, I was unaware of what was simultaneously transpiring at the U.S. Capitol building,” she told the network. She was working with a team of photographers who were taking shots of White House renovations.

She blamed Stephanie Grisham, then her chief of staff, for “dereliction of duty” in not briefing her and not being present at the White House.

Grisham last month tweeted out a screenshot of text message conversation in she asked the first lady, “Do you want to tweet that peaceful protests are the right of every American, but there is no place for lawlessness & violence?” According to Grisham, Melania Trump wrote back, “No.”

Broadcast networks preempted their primetime lineups for the hearing, as they did when the committee launched their latest series of sessions in June. Cable news networks also carried the hearing, with Fox News sticking to its lineup of primetime hosts and moving its news-side coverage, anchored by Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, to the Fox Business Network.

In the hearing room, more than 100 reporters squeezed into chairs and tables, a sign of the anticipation over this latest session, while four rows of gallery seats were filled with staffers and members of Congress.

Best of Deadline

• 2022-23 Awards Season Calendar - Dates For The Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Guilds, Festivals & More

• Oscars 2023 Telecast And Nomination Dates Set

• NFL 2022 Schedule: Primetime TV Games, Thanksgiving Menu, Christmas Tripleheader & More

Sign up for Deadline's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Click here to read the full article.