Jan. 6 key takeaways: Donald Trump ‘could not be moved’ amid Capitol mob

The House Jan. 6 committee is closing out its set of summer hearings with its most detailed focus yet on the investigation's main target: former President Donald Trump.

The House Jan. 6 committee is closing out its set of summer hearings with its most detailed focus yet on the investigation’s main target: former President Donald Trump.

The panel is examining Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, as hundreds of his supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol, guiding viewers minute-by-minute through the deadly afternoon to show how long it took for the former president to call off the rioters. The panel is focusing on 187 minutes that day, between the end of Trump’s speech calling for supporters to march to the Capitol at 1:10 p.m. and a video he released at 4:17 p.m. telling the rioters they were “very special” but they had to go home.

Trump was “the only person in the world who could call off the mob,” but he refused to do so for several hours, said the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, who was participating in the hearing remotely due to a COVID-19 diagnosis. “He could not be moved.”

The panel emphasized where Trump was as the violence unfolded – in a White House dining room, sitting at the head of the table, watching the violent breach of the Capitol on Fox News. He retreated to the dining room at 1:25 p.m., according to Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Va., one of two members who led the hearing. That was after some rioters had already breached barriers around the Capitol – and after Trump had been told about the violence within 15 minutes of returning to the White House.

Fox News was showing live shots of the rioters pushing past police, Luria said, showing excerpts of the coverage.

In video testimony played at the hearing, former White House aides talked about their frantic efforts to get the president to tell his supporters to turn around. Pat Cipollone, Trump’s top White House lawyer, told the panel that multiple aides – including Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump – advised the president to say something. “People need to be told” to leave, Cipollone recalled telling people, urging Trump to make a public announcement.

Trump “could not be moved,” Thompson said, “to rise from his dining room table and walk the few steps down the White House hallway into the press briefing room where cameras were anxiously and desperately waiting to carry his message to the armed and violent mob savagely beating and killing law enforcement officers.”

As he sat in the White House, Trump made no efforts to call for increased law enforcement assistance at the Capitol, the committee said. Witnesses confirmed that Trump did not call the defense secretary, the homeland security secretary or the attorney general.