Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who serves on the Jan. 6 Select Committee, offered more details on the panel’s next public hearing scheduled for Tuesday, which fellow member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) previously said will focus on “efforts to assemble” the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol.
Raskin and committee member Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) are set to lead the panel’s public hearing on Tuesday.
Appearing on CBS News, Raskin was asked who the live witnesses will be at Tuesday’s hearing.
Raskin declined to specify who the witnesses will be, but said the public can expect to learn “the fundamental importance” of an infamous meeting at the Trump White House on Dec. 18, 2020 that was part of a multi-part conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.
“On that day, the group of lawyers of outside lawyers who’ve been denominated ‘team crazy’ by people in and around the White House, came in to try to urge several new courses of action, including the seizure of voting machines around the country,” Raskin said, adding that some of the people at the meeting included former Trump adviser Michael Flynn and Trump campaign lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.
“But against this ‘team crazy’ were an inside group of lawyers who essentially wanted the President at that point to acknowledge that he had lost the election, and were far more willing to accept the reality of his defeat at that point. So there will be there will be other witnesses coming,” Raskin continued.
Raskin then clarified that there will be testimony about the Dec. 18 meeting, not witnesses who were there.
Reports of the Dec. 18, 2020 meeting began to emerge in February last year. Flynn and Powell reportedly presented Trump with a draft executive order to have Defense Department personnel seize voting machines in states across the country in an attempt to help Trump steal a second term in the White House.
Rancorous fights between those who tried pushing the proposal to seize voting machines and those in the White House who opposed it reportedly broke out during the meeting.
Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone was among the Trump White House figures who vehemently opposed the idea. Giuliani and Trump reportedly opposed it as well.
Three days after the Dec. 18 meeting, then-Attorney General Bill Barr told reporters that there was “no basis” for seizing voting machines.
During his interview on CBS News on Sunday, Raskin also pointed to a tweet Trump posted on Dec. 19, 2020, a day after the “crazy meeting” at the White House. Amid pushing the Big Lie, Trump tweeted it was “statistically impossible” for him to have lost to Joe Biden and alerted his supporters about a “big protest in D.C. on January 6th.”
“Be there, will be wild!” Trump tweeted at the time. (The former president’s Twitter account was suspended following the Capitol insurrection.)
Raskin indicated that the effect of Trump’s tweet — which far-right militia groups interpreted as an invitation to descend on Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 — will be discussed during the committee’s hearings this week.
“People are going to hear the story of that tweet, and then the explosive effect it had in Trumpworld, and specifically among the domestic violent extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country at that point,” Raskin said.
Murphy, who is set to co-lead Tuesday’s hearing with Raskin, similarly told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet was a “siren call” to far-right militia groups that Jan. 6 would be a “last stand” for Trump to remain in office.
Raskin’s latest remarks come a week after Schiff, who also serves as a member of the Jan. 6 Select Committee, said the panel will focus on “efforts to assemble” the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol in its next public hearing.
Tuesday’s hearing follows bombshell testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, late last month. In taped testimony aired during the panel’s public hearing, Hutchinson said she recalled hearing the words “Oath Keeper” and “Proud Boys” closer to the planning of the “Stop the Steal” rally, “when Mr. Giuliani would be around.”
Asked whether the committee has evidence to show that there was communication between far-right militia groups and the Trump White House during an interview on CBS News last week, Schiff declined to get into details on what the panel will present in its upcoming hearings, but confirmed that the next hearing will focus on “efforts to assemble that mob” of Trump supporters that descended on the National Mall.
“Who was participating, who was financing it, how it was organized, including the participation of these white-nationalist groups like the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and others. And so we’ll be presenting information we have,” Schiff said.
Watch Raskin’s remarks below:
