Washington — Former President Donald Trump removed a line ordering the Justice Department to prosecute the Jan. 6 rioters from a speech he delivered the day after the attack on the Capitol, according to a copy of a draft of his statements with his handwritten notes released Monday by the House select committee investigating the assault.
Rep. Elaina Luria, Democrat of Virginia who led the questioning for last week’s hearing with Rep. Adam Kinzinger, shared a video on his Twitter feed that includes taped testimony from former White House aides, including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and a document titled “Comments on National Healing.”
“It took President Trump more than 24 hours to address the nation again after his Jan. 6 Rose Garden video in which he affectionately told his supporters to go home in peace,” he said Luria he tweeted. “There was more I wasn’t willing to say.”
Commission of January 6
Asked about the document, Ivanka Trump told committee investigators that it appeared to be a copy of the draft of remarks Trump was due to deliver on Jan. 7 and identified the edits as written in her father’s handwriting.
The draft remarks included a line that Trump crossed out with a black marker: “I am directing the Department of Justice to make sure that all lawbreakers are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. We must send a message of course, not with mercy, but with JUSTICE. The legal consequences must be swift and firm.”
Below is a paragraph with the line “I want to be very clear that you do not represent me. You do not represent our movement” also crossed out. Trump edited a third sentence, which originally read “And if you break the law, you belong in jail” to instead say “And if you break the law, you will pay.”
In clips of testimony to the committee that were included in the more than three-minute video shared by Luria, Ivanka Trump said she believed conversations about the former president making comments began the night of Jan. 6, after the crowd of Trump supporters. violently broke into the Capitol building and delayed the counting of state electoral votes to reaffirm President Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
Kushner told the committee that he discussed “trying to come up with some drafts of comments by January 7 that we’re going to present to the president to try to say that we think it was important to call for more de-escalation.”
It took President Trump more than 24 hours to address the nation again after his Jan. 6 Rose Garden video in which he affectionately told his supporters to go home in peace.
There was more he wasn’t willing to say. pic.twitter.com/cJBIX5ROxs
— Rep. Elaine Luria (@RepElaineLuria) July 25, 2022
Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, said White House staff talked about the need for Trump to address the violence in order to curb talk that his cabinet invokes the 25th amendment to remove him from office. or his removal, according to his testimony to the committee.
“The main reason I had heard, other than, you know, we didn’t do enough on the 6th, we need to get a stronger message out and condemn it, otherwise that’s going to be your legacy, the secondary reason it was, think what can happen in the last 15 days of your presidency if we don’t do this. There’s already talk of invoking the 25th amendment, you need that as cover,” he recalled.
The video shared by Luria closes with testimony from John McEntee, the former director of the Office of Presidential Personnel, who told the committee that Kushner asked him to “goad” Trump into making the remarks.
Asked if the implication was that the former president was reluctant to give such a speech, McEntee said yes, based on “the fact that somebody has to tell me to find him,” according to the clip of his testimony.
The testimony and document released by Luria comes after the committee completed a stretch of hearings on Thursday, when it held its eighth public procedure focused on 187 minutes of Trump’s inaction as violence erupted in the Capitol.
The panel showed during the hearings Trump rehearsing a statement for Jan. 7, which included footage of him saying “I don’t want to say the election is over.” Some of the former president’s aides urged him to take action to quell the violence in the Capitol, according to testimony released by the committee, though he eventually tweeted out taped remarks recorded in the Rose Garden repeating his baseless claims that the elections were manipulated. and telling the rioters that they were “very special” but should return to their homes.
Assault on the United States Capitol
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