During its hearing on Thursday night, the House Jan. 6 Committee will present clips of then-President Donald Trump having a hard time sticking to the script while taping his address on Jan. 7 decrying the Capitol insurrection.
Committee members Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Adam Schiff (D-CA) confirmed in separate interviews on CNN on Wednesday night that the panel will play outtakes of the video that will reveal how reluctant Trump was to hold the insurrectionists accountable for the violence.
“The President displayed extreme difficulty in completing his remarks,” Raskin said. “It’s extremely revealing how exactly he went about making those statements, and we’re going to let everybody see parts of that.”
Schiff said the outtakes will reveal “all of those who are urging him to say something to do something to stop the violence.”
“You’ll hear the terrible lack of a response from the President, and you’ll hear more about how he was ultimately prevailed upon to say something and what he was willing to say and what he wasn’t,” Schiff added.
CNN and the Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the outtakes show that Trump tried to call the insurrectionists “patriots” and refused to admit the election he’d tried so hard to undo was over.
In the address that got released, Trump said he was “outraged” by the “heinous attack” on the Capitol.
“The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy,” he said. “To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”
That fiery rhetoric against the insurrectionists has been nowhere in sight since Trump left office. On the contrary, the ex-president has tried to whitewash the entire attack and paint the insurrectionists as “great people” who are now “being persecuted so unfairly” by prosecutors.
And although Trump’s then-staff reportedly managed to convince him not to praise the insurrectionists as “patriots” when he was filming the address on Jan. 7, he’s since freely called them exactly that: Patriots.
