Jan 6 panel: Trump tried to contact witness

Republican Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice-chair of the House committee investigating the Jan 6 attack on the Capitol, revealed Tuesday during the committee's seventh hearing that former president Donald Trump called a witness after the last hearing on June 28.

"President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation — a witness you have not yet seen in these hearings," Cheney said in her closing statement. "That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump's call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us."

Cheney said the committee supplied that information to the Justice Department and then she issued a warning to anyone who might consider interfering with witnesses.

"Let me say one more time: We will take any efforts to influence witness testimony very seriously," she said.

Cheney had previously said that the committee had evidence of witness tampering in its investigation. On June 28, at the committee's sixth hearing when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified, the committee showed excerpts of statements from witnesses alleging that they had been contacted by someone who tried to impact their testimony. There was no mention of Trump then.

In her opening remarks, Cheney said that after six hearings, Trump's allies are now pushing a new narrative: Trump was poorly served by his outside advisers.

"This of course is nonsense,'' she said. "Donald Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices."

Trump had access to more information about election integrity than perhaps anyone else in the country but chose to push forward with the lie that the election was stolen, Cheney said. "Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind."

Tuesday's hearing revealed details of a lengthy late night meeting at the White House with new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump's former White House counsel. He recalled an explosive meeting at the White House when Trump's outside legal team brought a draft executive order for the military to seize states' voting machines. Trump's team included lawyers Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and former national security adviser Michael Flynn.

According to Powell's testimony, Cipollone went racing into the Oval Office to try to intervene, which led to a six-hour meeting that ended after midnight but not before turning into a screaming match between the outside Trump advisers promoting election fraud claims and White House advisers who were trying to convince the president that he lost and should concede.

"I remember the three of them were really sort of forcefully attacking me verbally," Cipollone said in describing the argument.

Cipollone said he called seizing voting machines a "terrible idea" and said at the meeting, "That's not how we do things in the United States."

White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described the meeting, in a text message displayed by the committee: "The west wing is UNHINGED."

As Cipolllone said, in recently taped testimony shared by the committee Tuesday: "We were asking one simple question, as a general matter. Where is the evidence?"

"You guys are not tough enough," Giuliani in video testimony recalled the president telling the White House attorneys.

Powell and others had proposed that Trump give her authority to seize voting machines. The meeting ended with Trump saying he would appoint Powell as a special counsel. But Trump appeared to back off that in the next few days and instead on Dec 19 issued a tweet that called for supporters to go to Washington on Jan 6 when Congress would be tallying the Electoral College results: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!"

That tweet "electrified and galvanized his supporters, especially the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight against the government", said committee member Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

The committee also heard from a former spokesman for the right-wing militia group the Oath Keepers, Jason Van Tatenhove, and Stephen Ayres, a rioter who pleaded guilty to entering the Capitol building as part of an agreement with federal prosecutors.

"I followed President Trump on all of the websites. He basically put out, 'Come to the Stop the Steal rally' and I felt like I needed to be down here," Ayers testified. He said he believed all of Trump's claims about how the election was rigged and stolen.

Tatenhove, who is now a critic of the organization, said groups like the Oath Keepers thrive off propaganda, particularly "the swaying of people who may not know better through lies and rhetoric and propaganda that can get swept up in these moments. And I'll admit, I was swept up at one point as well."

He said he fears the alliance between Trump and the Oath Keepers isn't done.

"I think we've gotten exceedingly lucky that more bloodshed did not happen," he said, adding, "I do fear for this next election cycle, because who knows what that might bring — if a president that's willing to try to instill and encourage to whip up a civil war among his followers, using lies and deceit and snake oil and regardless of the human impact, what else is he going to do if he gets elected again?"