The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault released a massive trove of documents earlier this week that shed new light on how some of Donald Trump’s closest advisors and family members were tested by the president’s refusal to quickly and publicly try to stop the violent insurrection against the seat of American democracy.
The thousands of pages of newly released interview transcripts show how even Trump’s own children – Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. – desperately tried to get Trump to issue an unequivocal public statement. It would not only stop people from getting injured or killed at the Capitol, they argued, but help protect Trump’s legacy from being tarnished by the mob protest that he himself had encouraged during a speech earlier in the day at a rally a few blocks away.
Ivanka Trump, a senior White House advisor and Trump’s eldest daughter, told the committee she ‘fought like hell’ to do the best she could, including direct appeals to Trump as he watched the violence unfold while relaxing in his presidential dining room.
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Others, the new transcripts show, were furious with the president, claiming his failure to forcefully respond tarnished not only his legacy but their own as well. “It was totally unnecessary and incredibly unfortunate,” top Trump advisor Hope Hicks testified about the violent protests of Jan. 6. The committee also released a mountain of text messages it obtained during its 18-month investigation, including one from Hicks to another White House official, lamenting that because of Trump, “We all look like domestic terrorists now.”
Here’s what 11 of them had to say:
Ivanka Trump
Ivanka Trump told the January 6 committee that she learned of violence at the Capitol Jan. 6, 2021, when top Trump adviser Eric Herschmann “barged” into her office and told her to turn the television on.
Within minutes, she said, she rushed to the Oval Office, through a pantry and into the president’s private dining room, where she urged him to send out a tweet. When the violence continued, she helped him draft another. “It was important to underscore the goal,” she told the committee. “Here he says, you know, very specifically, ‘No violence!’ with an exclamation mark.” Once law enforcement began restoring order at the Capitol, Ivanka Trump said discussions turned to what the president should say more formally the next day, making sure to assure the American people there would be a peaceful transfer of power to Biden.
Grilled by committee members on why she didn’t do more to stop her father from perpetuating false claims of a stolen election or illegal attempts to overturn it, Ivanka said she didn’t the best she could. “I intervened when I felt like I had the knowledge and was apprised of the conversations and could do so,” she said. “But he’s the President of the United States. I’m his advisor, and I’m one of many advisors. I’m also his daughter.”
“I fought like hell to do the best job I could,” she said.
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Donald Trump Jr.
Donald Trump Jr. described working through White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to push his father into condemning the violence as it was occurring. “Again, you know, I think I made it pretty clear … violence has no place in this situation,” he told the committee.
Trump’s eldest son was worried, as he texted Meadows that day, that the president’s detractors “will try to f— his entire legacy on this if it gets worse.” In a 4:05 p.m. follow-up, according to texts obtained by the committee, he was even more urgent: “We need an oval address. He has to lead now. It’s gone too far and gotten out of hand.” Seven minutes later, Trump Jr. lamented how, “Now Biden beating us to the punch” in condemning the Capitol attack, the committee disclosed in its May 3 interview with him.
But Trump Jr. told committee investigators he didn’t recall talking to anyone at the White House or Trump’s inner circle to get his father to do more that day, including his sister Ivanka Trump, who was a senior advisor to the president at the time. And asked whether he talked personally with his father as the Jan. 6 events were unfolding, Trump Jr. said, “Not to my recollection, but, you know, you could obviously check the White House call logs or my phone. And, you know, perhaps I did, but I don’t remember it.”
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Jared Kushner
By the time White House aide Jared Kushner got off an international flight and arrived at the White House the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021, his efforts to push Donald Trump into issuing a strong statement condemning the rioters and urging peace had failed, he told the committee. Worse, he said, once Trump had made his video saying he loved the protesters, “he was basically retiring for the day.”
So Kushner said his focus – and that of his wife, Ivanka Trump – turned to “okay, what do we think we could do tomorrow to try to, you know, make things better than they are today. … It was a very shocking and unexpected situation.”
Meeting with other White House officials and Trump’s inner circle, Kushner said, he was pushing for the president to make remarks after Congress reconvened and finished its election certification that accomplished three things: a stronger call for de-escalation and non-violence, to “explicitly say we’d been doing a transfer of power,” and to specifically condemn the mob attack. “You don’t always give him what you would say,” Kushner said of Donald Trump. “You give him what you think he would say.” But, he added under several hours of questioning by the committee, he mostly failed in getting Trump to issue those kinds of stong and unequivocal statements.
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Cassidy Hutchinson
Cassidy Hutchinson was used to working for a mercurial president when she worked at the White House as a top aide to Meadows. But the wear and tear hit her hardest in the months after leaving the job, worrying she hadn’t done enough to prevent the Capitol attack.
In transcripts, details about the chaos of Jan. 6, 2021, came into sharper focus. Hutchinson said Meadows routinely burned documents in his office fireplace rather than placing them in official burn bags for sensitive records. After the mob chanted to hang Vice President Mike Pence, Meadows quoted Trump saying something like “Mike Pence deserves to be f— hung,” Hutchinson said. Trump’s tweet at 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, questioning Pence’s courage turned the faithful aide against her boss.
“As an American, I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie,” Hutchinson said of Trump’s tweet about Pence in her bombshell public testimony before the committee on June 28. Months after the attack,Hutchinson confided her concerns about not doing more to prevent the violence in a 20-minute call with White House security official Anthony Ornato, who assured her she did all she could.
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Hope Hicks
Hope Hicks, perhaps Trump’s closest aide and non-family confidante for many years, spent the two days before Jan. 6, 2021, trying – unsuccessfully – to get Trump to call for non-violence as his supporters massed in the capital for a “Stop the Steal” protest.
“I just had a bad feeling about the whole thing,” Hicks told the committee in a lengthy Oct. 25 deposition. “I just felt like no good was going to come of an event of that size in the middle of Washington, D.C.” She didn’t go to the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, but with the riot in full swing, she texted a White House official to complain about her boss. “In one day, he ended every future opportunity that doesn’t include speaking engagements at the local proud boy’s chapter. … We all look like domestic terrorists now.” She texted another White House staffer to say, “Attacking the VP? WTF is wrong with him?” according to texts released by the committee.
So what did you mean by that, Hicks was asked by a committee investigator. “I just felt like that was, it was just like everything else that day,” she responded. “It was totally unnecessary and incredibly unfortunate.”
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Eric Herschmann
Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer who worked with Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani as a federal prosecutor and who defended Trump at his first impeachment, said the president’s tweet questioning Pence’s courage shocked the entire staff.
“I was a prosecutor and (had) issues where police are shot and agents are shot and people have died. And it’s been chaotic,” Herschmann said. “But there was a complete and utter state of shock.”
Minutes after the tweet, Herschmann handed Meadows a handwritten note suggesting what Trump should say to condemn the violence. But Trump never delivered the words.
“People thought very much that the violence, you know, was a terrible way to end what a lot of people had committed themselves to public service for,” Herschmann said.
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Anthony Ornato
Anthony Ornato, a Secret Service official detailed to the White House as deputy chief of staff for operations, said he didn’t interact much with Trump because of his familiarity with a rigid chain of command in law enforcement. His silence continued despite his emotional reaction to the Capitol attack.
After learning about 1:30 p.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, that two police officers were knocked unconscious defending the Capitol and being taken to the hospital, Ornato brought a handwritten note about the two injured officers to Meadows, who was meeting with Trump in a dining room. Their conversation stopped as Ornato entered the room.
“I was tunnel visioned at the chief of staff,” Ornato, who described himself as “emotional that officers were hurt,” told the committee. “I handed him the note and I turned around and walked out.”
Kayleigh McEnany
Kayleigh McEnany, who served as the former president’s press secretary through the final days of his administration, said she encouraged Trump on Jan. 7, 2021, to make comments that would heal the country from the violence that happened the day before.
In her testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, McEnany said she walked into the Oval Office to speak with Trump and said she wanted to do a press conference on healing the country that would be followed by Trump’s own remarks, and that Trump was receptive to the idea. “It was important to me to help to heal the country and use the podium to do that.”
McEnany also told the committee that, in retrospect, it would have been better if comments that Trump made Jan. 7, 2021 happened the day before, but she said there were “certain realities” on Jan. 6, 2021, such as the Washington, D.C, mayor imposing a curfew and chief of staff Mark Meadows telling her to go home.
Rudy Giuliani
Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani argued throughout his 245-page deposition that Trump won the 2020 election, but the protest at the Capitol over the results should never have turned violent.
Giuliani said the eight federal judges Trump appointed among the 60 cases to reject election-fraud claims “didn’t want to get involved.” Giuliani repeatedly refused to answer questions based on attorney-client privilege, but said Trump agreed with his assessment the riot was “enormously destructive to Donald Trump.”
“I’m very disappointed that our people would do this,” Giuliani said he told Trump. “He agrees with that, yeah.”
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Pat Cipollone
Pat Cipollone, then White House counsel, was proud to work in the White House, proud to serve the president, he said. But by Jan. 6, 2021, he was already contemplating resignation even before seeing the images on television of rioters breaching the Capitol, he said in his July 8 testimony.
Cipollone went to Meadows’ office and eventually the president’s private dining room off the Oval Office to demand “an immediate and forceful response (and)public statement, that people need to leave the Capitol now,” Cipollone told the committee. He declined to reveal direct communications with Trump, saying they were privileged and protected from disclosure. But Cipollone told the committee he thought tweets weren’t enough. “I believed more needed to be done,” he said.
That week, Cipollone considered resigning but ultimately stayed on. “One thing I was concerned about is if people in the counsel’s office left, who would replace me?” He told the committee what happened Jan. 6, 2021, “cannot be justified in any form or fashion.”
“It’s not who we are in this country,” he said. “I was feeling that in the strongest possible terms on that day and subsequent to that day.”
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Kellyanne Conway
Kellyanne Conway, who left her job as an aide to Trump in August 2020, said she considered the election settled in late 2020 and expressed skepticism to Trump about whetherthe claims of fraud he was hearing would change the outcome of the election. Although she kept speaking with the former president, including for a lunch on Dec. 22, 2021, she said they never talked about the attack and she found out about the violence watching it on television at her home in New Jersey.
Conway testified that on the afternoon of Jan. 6, after seeing the violence, she quickly got a phone number for Nick Luna, an aide who she knew would be standing next to Trump. She told Luna, “You’ve got to tell the President to tell people to get out of there. Like, I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody can make sense of this. But he has to – he has to tell them to get out of there.”
When Luna offered to put Conway on the phone with Trump, she said she declined and said they can speak later. She said she did not attempt to contact Trump directly. She said while she usually calls Trump through the switchboard, that takes a long time, and Trump doesn’t always have his cell phone on him. “I said, ‘Add my name to the chorus of people calling.’ I was absolutely convinced people were calling from everywhere and running around the place trying to make sense of it all.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: January 6 anniversary: Trump aides shook by attack, transcripts show
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