WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite desperate pleas from aides, allies, Republican congressional leaders and even his family, Donald Trump refused to call off the Jan. 6 mob attack on the Capitol, instead “pouring gasoline on the fire” by aggressively tweeting his false claims of a stolen election and celebrating his crowd of supporters as “very special.”
The next day, he declared anew, “I don't want to say the election is over." That was in a previously unaired outtake of an address to the nation he was to give, shown at Thursday night's prime-time hearing of the House investigating committee.
The committee documented how for some 187 minutes, from the time Trump left a rally stage sending his supporters to the Capitol to the time he ultimately appeared in the Rose Garden video, nothing could compel the defeated president to act. Instead, he watched the violence unfold on TV.
“President Trump didn’t fail to act,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a fellow Republican but frequent Trump critic who flew combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. “He chose not to act.”
After months of work and weeks of hearings, the prime-time hearing started the way the committee began — laying blame for the deadly attack on Trump himself for summoning the mob to Washington and sending them to Capitol Hill.
The defeated president turned his supporters' “love of country into a weapon,” said the panel's Republican vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
Far from finishing its work after Thursday's hearing,...
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