Jan. 6 committee holds seventh hearing

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, in the first aired footage of the 8-hour interview he had with members of the Jan. 6 select committee, said he agreed with other Trump officials that there was not sufficient evidence of election fraud.

Cipollone specifically testified that he believed former President Donald Trump should've conceded the election.

"I was the White House counsel. Some of those decisions were political. ... If your questions is did I believe he should concede the election at a point in time? Yes I did,” he said in video footage shown in the hearing.

He said his thoughts were "in line" with that of what Sen. Mitch McConnell first said about accepting the results of the election on the Senate floor.

GOP Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the Jan. 6 select committee, said former President Donald Trump and his allies deceived the American public about widespread election fraud, when they "lacked actual evidence."

Cheney continued, "These Americans did not have access to the truth like Donald Trump did. They put their faith and their trust in Donald Trump. They wanted to believe in him. They wanted to fight for their country. And he deceived them. For millions of Americans that may be painful to accept but it is true."

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a Jan. 6 committee member, referenced a meeting that took place on Friday, Dec. 18, 2020, at the White House that he says has been called "unhinged," "not normal," and "the craziest meeting of the Trump presidency."

Raskin said that a team of outside advisers to Trump visited him in the White House on that date. "The outside lawyers who had been involved in dozens of failed lawsuits had lots of theories supporting the big lie, but no evidence to support it. As we will see, however, they brought to the White House a draft executive order that they had prepared for President Trump to further his ends. Specifically, they proposed the immediate mass seizure of state election machines by the US military," the Maryland Democrat said.

Raskin said that the meeting ended after midnight "with apparent rejection of that idea."

"In the wee hours of Dec. 19, dissatisfied with his options, Donald Trump decided to call for a "large and wild crowd" on Wednesday, Jan. 6 — the day when Congress would meet to certify the electoral votes," he said.

Former Trump administration Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia told the House Select Committee that he urged then-President Donald Trump to concede around Dec. 14, 2020, when the Electoral College affirmed Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.

“But I communicated to the President that when that legal process is exhausted and when the electors have voted, that's the point at which that outcome needs to be accepted,” Scalia continued. “I told him I did believe, yes, that once those legal processes were run, if fraud had not been established that had affected the outcome of the election that unfortunately I believed what had to be done was concede the outcome.”

The Electoral College meeting on Dec. 14 was significant because that signaled that the Trump campaign’s legal challenges had run their course and the election had been affirmed for Biden, even as the Trump campaign tried to put forward fake electors in key states. 

The committee said that it was also the moment when Trump and his allies turned their attention to Jan. 6 and the congressional certification of the election. 

Scalia’s testimony is the latest instance where the committee has shown how Trump’s advisers rejected his claims that the election was stolen, and how the former President ignored their arguments and continued to try to overturn the election result. 

Scalia, the son of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, served as Trump’s labor secretary from 2019 to 2021.

Rep. Stephanie Murphy, a member of the Jan. 6 select committee, said that one of former President Trump's tweets in the lead-up to the Capitol attack was a "call to action and in some cases, as a call to arms for many of President Trump's most loyal supporters."

On Dec. 19, 2020, Trump tweeted encouragement for his supporters to travel to Washington, DC, on Jan. 6, 2021. "Be there, will be wild," it read, according to Murphy.

"It's clear the President intended the assembled crowd on the Jan. 6 to serve his goal. And as you have already seen and as you will see again today, some of those who are coming had specific plans. The President's goal it was to stay in power for a second term despite losing the election. The assembled crowd was one of the tools to achieve that goal," Murphy continued.

Many of the Trump supporters who flocked to Washington on Jan. 6, including many who breached the Capitol, have said that this tweet motivated them to make the trip, according to court filings from some of the 800-plus criminal cases related to the insurrection. Members of far-right extremist groups also drew inspiration from Trump’s tweets, according to court filings.

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, laid out the foundation for the panel's seventh public hearing, saying evidence will show how former President "Trump summoned a mob" in a "last-ditch effort" to overturn the 2020 election.

Thompson said by Dec. 14, 2020, Joe Biden had been elected President but, "by that point, many of Donald Trump supporters were already convinced that the election had been stolen because that's what Donald Trump had been telling them."

He said the former President should have tried to defuse the anger.

"He went the opposite way. He seized on the anger he had already stoked among his most loyal supporters and as they approach the line, he didn't wave them off, he urged them on," Thompson said.

Rep. Liz Cheney, Jan. 6 committee vice chair, said in her opening statement that they have "seen a change in how witnesses and lawyers in the Trump orbit approached this committee."

Cheney continued, saying that the new strategy of Trump's allies in defending him appears to be that Trump was "manipulated by others outside the administration" like attorneys John Eastman or Sidney Powell or Rep. Scott Perry.

"The strategy is to blame people his advisers called, quote, the crazies, for what Donald Trump did. This, of course, is nonsense," Cheney said, adding that Trump is a 76-year-old man and "not an impressionable child." 

"Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices. As our investigation has shown, Donald Trump had access to more detailed and specific information showing that the election was not actually stolen than almost any other American," Cheney said.

Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone's testimony to the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol "met our expectations," said Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the committee.

A dozen clips from Cipollone's testimony last week are expected to be seen at the hearing.

While it is rare for all the Jan. 6 select committee members to participate in a deposition, every member was present at different parts of Cipollone's deposition. A source described their participation as active and engaged, and every member was present for most of the interview.

This underscores how the committee views Cipollone's role as significant and that it will likely be a key part in today’s hearings and others going forward. 

Cipollone invoked executive privilege in his closed-door interview Friday with the committee despite the panel's attempts to pose questions that would not have required such a response, according to a person familiar with the interview.

When Jan. 6 select committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson was asked if he expects former White House strategist Steve Bannon to testify, Thompson told CNN, “not yet.”

He said that Bannon has to comply with all elements in the subpoena first. 

“In order for us to consider, he has agreed to comply with the items in the subpoena,” Thompson said.

Asked if he expected Ginni Thomas — the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas — to testify before the committee in a deposition, Thompson said, “not at this point.”

He also said the nearly eight hours of former President Trump's White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s private testimony was sufficient and they don’t plan to bring him in as a live witness, saying it’s “probably all we need.”