Trump planned Capitol march, tried to make it look spontaneous: Panel

WASHINGTON • Former president Donald Trump attempted to make the Jan 6, 2021, march on the Capitol appear spontaneous, even as he and his team intentionally assembled and galvanised a violence-prone mob to disrupt certification of his electoral defeat, the House committee investigating the attack has alleged.

"POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol," Ms Kylie Jane Kremer, an organiser of the "Save America" rally on Jan 6 last year, wrote in a Jan 4 text shown by the panel, as it detailed Mr Trump's efforts to gather his backers in Washington for a last-ditch effort to overturn his loss. POTUS stands for President of the United States. Ms Kremer added that Mr Trump was "going to just call for it 'unexpectedly'."

Mr Trump weighed announcing the move, according to documents obtained from the National Archives, which provided the investigators with a draft tweet that said: "I will be making a Big Speech at 10am on January 6th at the Ellipse (South of the White House). Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!"

The tweet was never sent, but it was the latest evidence presented by the committee of how Mr Trump undertook a public and private effort to channel angry supporters, including right-wing extremists, towards the Capitol, where then Vice-President Mike Pence and lawmakers were gathered to confirm Mr Joe Biden as the president-elect.

For more than a year, Mr Trump and his defenders have described the violence at the Capitol as a peaceful protest gone awry. But the hearing on Tuesday laid out how the former president took a guiding role not only in bringing the mob fuelled by his election lies to Washington that day, but also in the plan to direct it up to Capitol Hill.

"The president got everybody riled up and told everybody to head on down," said one of the witnesses at the hearing, Stephen Ayres, an Ohio man who pleaded guilty last month to disorderly conduct charges connected to the Capitol attack. "We basically were just following what he said."

Even Mr Brad Parscale, Mr Trump's one-time campaign manager, blamed his former boss for the deadly violence that ensued. "A sitting president asking for civil war… I have lost faith," he wrote in text messages on Jan 6 last year to Ms Katrina Pierson, Mr Trump's former spokesman, adding that Mr Trump's "rhetoric killed someone". Even as it revealed new evidence about Mr Trump's bid to cling to power, the committee suggested that he was still trying to protect himself.

Representative Liz Cheney, the panel's vice-chair, repeated her concerns that Mr Trump has been interfering with the committee's work by discouraging witnesses from cooperating with the inquiry.

After the panel's last presentation, she said, Mr Trump tried to call one of its witnesses. "We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously," Ms Cheney said, adding that the panel had notified the Justice Department about it. In a statement on Twitter, Mr Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Mr Trump, accused Ms Cheney of spreading "innuendoes and lies" but did not address whether Mr Trump had tried to contact a witness.

In the hearing room on Tuesday, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democrat and panel member, sought to draw a road map of Mr Trump's multilayered effort to overturn his defeat, unfolding in three concentric rings.

On the inside ring, he said, was Mr Trump's pressure campaign against Mr Pence to persuade him to unilaterally throw out electoral votes for Mr Biden. In the middle ring were far-right extremist groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers - unleashed by a Dec 19 tweet from Mr Trump - taking the lead in invading and occupying the Capitol. And in the outer ring, he added, a large and angry crowd, encouraged by Mr Trump's lies about election fraud, became a "political force" that sought to keep him in power.

The story the committee told on Tuesday took place over three chaotic weeks at the end of 2020, starting on Dec 14, when the Electoral College met and declared Mr Biden the winner of the election.

The committee documented how Mr Trump ignored top administration officials and turned his hopes and attention to a group of outside advisers who were recommending a dangerous and unprecedented plan to use the country's national security assets to seize control of voting machines and essentially rerun the election.

Through videotaped testimony, the panel brought to life a heated meeting in the Oval Office on Dec 18, 2020, in which the advisers - among them, lawyer Sidney Powell and National Security Adviser Michael Flynn - argued with White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and other White House advisers about the plan to seize the machines and appoint a special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Early the next morning, Mr Trump posted the message on Twitter urging his supporters to come to Washington on Jan 6, writing, "Be there, will be wild!"

The response to the message was immediate and electric.

NYTIMES