Jan. 6 committee holds eighth hearing

The House Select Committee during Thursday’s hearing revealed a never-before-seen script for then-President Trump's video message to rioters on January 6, showing that staff intended for Trump to claim that the vast majority if his supporters who had stormed the US Capitol were acting "peacefully." 

In the script, made public for the first time during Thursday's select committee hearing, Trump was supposed to say: "I urge all my supporters to do exactly as 99.9% of them have already been doing – express their passions and opinions peacefully. My supporters have a right to have their voices heard but make no mistake – NO ONE should be using violence or threats of violence to express themselves. Especially at the U.S. Capitol. Let's respect our institutions. Let's do all better. I am asking you to leave the Capitol Hill region NOW and go home in a peaceful way.“

The prepared script – an official White House document – was stamped with “THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN,” according to the images displayed Thursday by the committee.

However, the video that Trump eventually posted on Twitter deviated significantly from this script. There was no direct condemnation of the violence, but he did say “we don’t want anybody hurt.” He didn’t make the “99.9%” claim in the final video, but he did heap praise on the rioters, saying “we love you” and “you’re very special.” And Trump falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election, even though that was not in the prepared remarks.

Trump filmed the video in the White House Rose Garden as White House attorney Eric Herschmann and Trump’s body man Nick Luna watched. Both testified that the former President did not stick to a script that they had provided him – choosing instead to speak "off the cuff," according to testimony from Luna. 

"Ultimately, these (prepared) remarks... were not the remarks that the President delivered in the Rose Garden," Luna testified, referring to the video Trump eventually sent out telling his supporters, "We love you."

Correction: An earlier version incorrectly said the committee played video of Trump reading his remarks. The committee only displayed the draft of his prepared remarks. 

In closed-door testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone implied then-President Donald Trump was alone in his opposition to taking further action to convince rioters at the US Capitol to disperse and go home. 

Cipollone, who recently appeared before the committee after receiving a subpoena for his testimony, said he and virtually every other senior aide in the White House that day had urged Trump to tell people to go home as his supporters violently stormed the Halls of Congress. 

"When you talk about others on the staff thinking more should be done or thinking that the President needed to tell people to go home, who would you put in that category? Cipollone was asked by Rep. Liz Cheney during his deposition. 

"Well, I would put in that category... in terms of a positive push to get a positive effort to get more done faster, Pat Philbin, Eric Herschmann," Cipollone responded, naming two other White House attorneys. 

"Overall, Mark Meadows, Ivanka. Once Jared got there, Jared, General [Keith] Kellogg," he continued. "I'm probably missing some, but those are – Kayleigh [McEnany] was there."  

Cipollone was then asked who "on the staff" or "in the White House" did not want the rioters to leave the Capitol. 

Asked if he would include Trump in that camp, Cipollone, who has been cautious about potential executive privilege violations, said he couldn't reveal communications between himself and Trump "but obviously, I think you know – yeah." 

Jan. 6 select committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger took Cipollone's testimony as indication that Trump, who other witnesses have previously said was resistant to asking his supporters to stand down, was not on board with efforts to try and halt the violence. 

Trump's first message to the violent protesters came three hours after they first stormed the Capitol in the form of a short video shared to his Twitter feed in which he told the protesters, "Go home. We love you. You're very special."

Trump tweeted again hours later, saying, "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly and unfairly treated for so long." 

Former President Trump resisted advice from advisers and White House staff to send a message of peace to rioters the day of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sarah Matthews, former White House deputy press secretary, said during her testimony.

Following Trump's tweet attacking then-Vice President Mike Pence on Jan. 6, 2021, Matthews said that she urged then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany that Trump sent out a tweet condemning the violence at the Capitol and that "there needed to be a call to action to tell these people to leave the Capitol."

She said that Kayleigh McEnany agreed and went to the Oval dining room to discuss it with the President, but when the tweet was finally sent out, Matthews said she didn't feel it went far enough.

"When she got back, she told me that a tweet had been sent out. And I told her that I thought the tweet did not go far enough. That I thought there needed to be a call to action, and he needed to condemn the violence," Matthews said.

Watch the moment here:

For the first time, the Jan. 6 select committee played audio of Donald Trump Jr.’s closed-door deposition. While it was known that Trump Jr. met with the committee, this was the first time the audio was played publicly.

During the deposition, the committee asked Trump Jr. about his texts with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows during the insurrection. As CNN has previously reported, Trump Jr. texted Meadows that his dad has “got to condemn this sh*t ASAP,” and that his tweets in the earlier afternoon weren’t enough.

Meadows told Trump Jr. that he agreed, and Trump Jr. replied, “this one you go to the mattresses on. They will try to f**k his entire legacy on this if it gets worse.”

Asked to explain the “mattresses” reference, Trump Jr. said during his deposition, “It’s just a reference for going all in I think it’s a ‘Godfather’ reference.” The clip shown by the committee was extremely brief.

The panel has already shown footage of Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, as well as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who were both White House advisers for all four years of Trump’s administration. Earlier in Thursday’s hearing, the panel played a clip of Kushner saying he believes that President has an obligation to ensure a peaceful transfer of power.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is back after taking a short break. 

The panel's eighth public hearing has focused on how former President Donald Trump did not step in to stop the insurrection as the violence unfolded, with former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews testifying about what they saw.

Read takeaways from the hearing so far here.

The House select committee revealed, for the first time, Secret Service radio traffic as agents assessed the Senate stairwell where former Vice President Mike Pence would be evacuated, while rioters were confronting police in a hallway downstairs at the same time.

The video played Thursday spliced together the surveillance tapes with the footage and sound of Pence's detail, bringing into focus how near a miss Pence and his detail experienced.

Law enforcement on the radio traffic discussed whether they had time to evacuate Pence, or if they were about to lose their route to safety. 

The agents on the radio realized only a half dozen police officers stood between them and the crowd.

A smoke bomb went off where the rioters were confronting police, according to surveillance footage of the hallway full of rioters, then Secret Service discussed the "unknown smoke" and made the call to take Pence to a loading dock in the complex.

Watch here:

Former Vice President Mike Pence's security detail was so concerned for safety inside the Capitol as rioters broke into the building, that they "were starting to fear for their own lives," one committee witness said.

The moments were so tense, "there were calls to say goodbye to family members," an unidentified national security professional told the committee in a recorded interview played on Thursday.

He said it appeared that the agents were realizing they were running out of options and may have considered using lethal force.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is presenting evidence in its eighth public hearing on Thursday night to show what Trump was doing while the Capitol was under attack. 

The committee’s goal is to show what was going on in the White House during the riot and to demonstrate that Trump did not take action as the violence unfolded. Some committee members have described this as Trump’s “dereliction of duty.”

The committee is hearing testimony from Matthew Pottinger, a former Trump deputy national security adviser, and Sarah Matthews, a former Trump deputy press secretary. Both Pottinger and Matthews resigned after the insurrection.

The panel is also playing taped footage from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s deposition earlier this month.

Here are some of the key points from the hearing so far:

Matt Pottinger, former National Security adviser, said that former President Trump's tweet calling then-Vice President Mike Pence a "coward" essentially was "fuel being poured on the fire" the day of the insurrection.

"Shortly before I had gotten back to the White House, I had come from off site. I began to see, for the first time, those images on TV about the chaos that was unfolding at the Capitol. One of my aides handed me a sheet of paper that contained the tweet that you just read.  And I read it and was quite disturbed by it," Pottinger said.

Pottinger said that the tweet led to him resigning from his post that day, stating, "that was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign, that that would be my last day at the White House. I simply didn't want to be associated with the events that were unfolding on the Capitol."