In a phone call the evening of the January 6 Capitol riot, then-President Donald Trump refused a request from his then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to withdraw his objections and allow for Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, prosecutors said in the new indictment.
The allegation came in a section of the charging documents that describes how Trump allegedly exploited the violence and the chaos at the Capitol that day.
Prosecutors pointed to Trump’s alleged repeated refusals to direct the rioters to depart the Capitol. Trump did eventually tell the rioters to go home in a recorded video message released at 4:17 p.m. local time that day.
The indictment also describes phone calls that Co-Conspirator 1 – whom appears, based on the description, to be Rudy Giuliani – made to members of Congress that evening.
In a voicemail left with an unidentified US Senator, Giuliani asked the senator to "object to every state and kind of spread this out a little bit like a filibuster,” according to a line from the voicemail quoted in the indictment.