By Todd Lassa
Tuesday’s 1/6 panel hearing took us from an “unhinged” late-night post-election White House shouting match over a wild plan to overturn Joe Biden’s win to how extremist, white supremacist groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and QAnon tried to use force to back then-President Donald Trump’s attempt to make his vice president reject Electoral College results.
“What it was going to be was an armed revolution,” Jason Van Tatenhove (above, right), a former spokesman for Oath Keepers, told the committee in live testimony Tuesday afternoon. “I mean, people died that day.” Law enforcement officers were attacked and injured, he said. “There was a gallows set up in front of the Capitol. This could have been the start of a new civil war, and no one would have won that day.”
Van Tatenhove was not at the Capitol January 6, 2021 — he left the extremist group’s employ years earlier after listening to members speak about the Holocaust not being real. But he described how a successful insurrection on January 6 would have given Oath Keepers founder and then-president Stewart Rhodes “a path forward” to become a paramilitary leader at Trump’s right hand.
The Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and other extremist groups who had coalesced at the Capitol on January 6 had attempted to overturn the election by force only after Trump and his allies in the plot had failed to advance a plan for the lame-duck president to declare martial law and seize voting machines.
This hearing laid out how the desperation of Trump and his closest allies to overturn the election turned into a collaboration with violent racist, extremist groups on January 6. The House Select committee began by describing a late-night meeting December 18, 2020, in which Michael Flynn, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant general who served as national security adviser for the first 22 days of the Trump administration; Sidney Powell, the former federal prosecutor who has emerged as central to Trump’s efforts to retain power; former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani; Trump official Emily Newman; and former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne held a loud meeting with Trump and his White House aides arguing that the presidential election was stolen and that Venezuela, China, and other countries manipulated voting machines to change ballots to benefit Biden.
The group presented a draft order written two days earlier that said “effective immediately, the secretary of Defense shall seize voting machines.” Plans also would have named Powell special prosecutor to investigate voter fraud.
Various witnesses in videotaped testimony, including Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone and senior adviser Eric Herschmann, described the meeting as a shout-fest, with administration aides exchanging insults with Flynn, Powell, Giuliani, Newman and Byrne.
Cipollone, from eight hours of video testimony taken last Friday, said he and other White House aides in the meeting reacted to repeated suggestions of voter fraud from the group by seeking evidence.
“Put up or shut up,” Cipollone said. To “have the federal government seize voting machines? That was a terrible idea. I don’t understand why we have to tell you that’s a bad idea, a terrible idea.”
On a plan to name Powell special prosecutor, Cipollone told the 1/6 committee, “I don’t think she should be appointed to anything.”
By the time this shouting match moved from the West Wing to the Yellow Oval room in the presidential living quarters Cassidy Hutchinson, the aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows who became a heroine with her live testimony in the sixth 1/6 hearing, texted Secret Service official Tony Ornato that the meeting had become “unhinged.”
It broke up after midnight.
Although the White House aides and their rational approach prevailed, Trump December 19 tweeted out an invite to the “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th … . Be there, will be wild!”
A former Twitter comments moderation employee, appearing anonymously by video, described how the social media company let through a flood of tweets describing a gathering of arms by Trump supporters ahead of the January 6 insurrection and how Twitter has culpability for a deadly riot.
Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander, Infowars’ Alex Jones, and Oath Keepers’ president Stewart Rhodes led the way.
Rhodes considered himself the leader of a paramilitary group that would support Trump after overthrowing the government January 6, said Van Tatenhove, the former Oath Keepers spokesman, even though Rhodes described the group as “not a militia,” but a “community preparedness team” or “veterans’ support group.”
Stephen Ayres (above, left) of Warren, Ohio, who pled guilty to breaching the Capitol that day testified alongside Van Tatenhove, saying he did not plan to march to the Capitol until Trump told the crowd he would lead the way.
“I lost my job, pretty much sold my house,” Ayres told the committee. “It changed my life and not for the good… . I consider myself a family man and I love my country, and I don’t think any one man is bigger than (that).”
The committee’s vice chairman, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) used her closing remarks to warn again of potential witness tampering by former President Trump. She revealed that after last week’s hearing, Trump attempted to call a future witness who has not yet testified, but the witness passed the message on to their attorney.
“We will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously,” Cheney said.
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