Trump had ‘extreme difficulty’ with his speech on the day after January 6
By Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen, Annie Grayer and Jamie Gangel, CNN
The House committee investigating the insurrection plans to show footage at Thursday’s hearing of then-President Donald Trump having difficulty working through efforts to tape a message to his supporters on January 7, 2021, the day after the Capitol riot, sources familiar with the committee’s plans tell CNN.
The outtakes, first reported by The Washington Post, were part of production of a speech Trump gave the night after the riot. They show Trump having a difficult time working through the effort to tape the message. Trump refused to say the election results had been settled and attempted to call the rioters patriots. He also went to great lengths to not accuse them of any wrongdoing.
A spokesman for the January 6 select committee declined to comment on the outtakes.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who is a member of the committee, confirmed Wednesday night to CNN’s Anderson Cooper that the panel has the outtakes and plans to share some of them during the hearing.
“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.”
The video tape outtakes will be one part of a larger presentation during which the committee plans to detail Trump’s lack of attention to the ongoing riot. The committee has said it will focus on the 187 minutes that Trump sat back, refusing to act, as the Capitol was under siege. Some committee members have described this as Trump’s “dereliction of duty.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a retiring Republican from Illinois who is one of the two GOP members on the select committee, on Thursday morning teased some footage from the depositions that will be aired as part of the hearing. In a video montage, several aides describe Trump watching TV in the White House dining room instead of taking action during the crisis.
“Donald Trump is a disgrace to America,” Kinzinger wrote on Twitter.
This story has been updated with additional details Wednesday.
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CNN’s Mary Kay Mallonee contributed to this report.
