For more than a year, Trump and his defenders have described the violence at the Capitol as a freewheeling peaceful protest gone awry. But the hearing Tuesday laid out how the former president took a guiding role not only in bringing the mob fueled by his election lies to Washington that day, but also in the plan to direct it up to Capitol Hill, disregarding the advice of his closest aides
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump attempted to make the Jan. 6, 2021, march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even as he and his team intentionally assembled and galvanized a violence-prone mob to disrupt certification of his electoral defeat, the House committee investigating the attack showed Tuesday.
“POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol,” Kylie Jane Kremer, an organizer of the “Save America” rally Jan. 6, wrote in a Jan. 4 text shown by the panel Tuesday as it detailed Trump’s efforts to gather his backers in Washington for a final, last-ditch effort to overturn his loss. Kremer added that Trump was “going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”
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