According to sources familiar with the committee’s plans, the House committee looking into the uprising intends to display footage at Thursday’s hearing of then-President Donald Trump struggling to record a message for his supporters on January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot.
The outtakes, first reported by The Washington Post, were produced for a speech Trump delivered the evening following the melee. They depict Trump struggling to complete the attempt to record the message. Trump attempted to label the rioters as Americans while refusing to declare the election results to be final. He also made a huge effort to avoid pointing any finger at them for misconduct.
A spokesman for the January 6 select committee chose not to respond to questions about the outtakes.
The committee’s Democratic member from Maryland, Rep. Jamie Raskin, confirmed to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night that it has the outtakes and intends to show some of them during the meeting.
“The President displayed extreme difficulty in completing his remarks,” Raskin said on “Anderson Cooper 360.”
“It’s extremely revealing how exactly he went about making those statements, and we’re going to let everybody see parts of that,” he added.
Rep. Adam Schiff, another committee member, told CNN’s Don Lemon later Wednesday that the outtakes “will be significant in terms of what the President was willing to say and what he wasn’t willing to say.”
The California Democrat said the outtakes will show “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.”
As per CNN, the committee intends to highlight Trump’s disregard for the unfolding disturbance in a wider presentation that will include the video recording outtakes as one component. The committee has stated that it will concentrate on the 187 minutes during which Trump stood by and did nothing as the Capitol was under attack. This has been referred to by some committee members as Trump’s “dereliction of duty.”
One of the two GOP members on the select committee, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, who is retiring, on Thursday morning, teased some footage from the depositions that will be shown during the meeting. In a video montage, multiple aides said Trump chose to watch TV in the dining room of the White House rather than act during the crisis.
Kinzinger wrote on Twitter, “Donald Trump is a disgrace to America.”
