WASHINGTON — Ally after ally of former President Donald Trump — his eldest daughter, his former attorney general, a former senior campaign aide — admitted to congressional investigators that his claims that the 2020 election were stolen from him were false.
That testimony were just some the revelations during the first day of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, interspersed with shocking, never-before-seen video of the deadly attack and powerful statements from a Capitol Police officer who battled rioters.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff which I told the president was bullshit,” former Attorney General Bill Barr testified.
The panel says it is building a case that Trump was responsible for the insurrection. "He personally asked us to come to D.C. that day," one person in the mob said in a video played at the end of the hearing, part of a montage of several others who said they were there at the former president's behest.
In one particularly notable moment, video of Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, elicited gasps when he explained how after Vice President Mike Pence called pleading for military help to quash the riot, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, called to ask for help in dispelling the image that Trump was no longer in charge.
New video showed police being brutalized by the mob, airing footage taped by a documentarian that included audio, unlike much of the silent security video aired during Trump's second impeachment proceedings.
“I can remember my breath catching in my throat, because what I saw was a war scene,” Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards, one of the first two witnesses called in the hearings, said.
Edwards, who was injured by the rioters, described the scene at the Capitol as "something out of a movie."
“Officers on the ground. They were bleeding, on the ground, throwing up,” she said, adding, "It was carnage. It was chaos."
The footage and testimony left some officers and lawmakers in attendance in tears.
The committee promised details of a seven-point plan that Trump and his allies developed and implemented in a bid to undermine American democracy that culminated in the deadly riot.
"Jan. 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup," Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in his opening statement. "A brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6th, 'to overthrow the government.' The violence was no accident. It represented Trump’s last, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power."