Democratic Representative Stephanie Murphy said former President Donald Trump made “last minute changes” to his January 6, 2021 speech from the Ellipse while listening to a rally attended by far-right extremists held near the White House on January evening. 5. 2021.
“Based on the documents we received from the National Archives, including several drafts of the presidents’ speeches, as well as testimonies, we understand how this speech turned into a call to action and a call to fight” , Murphy said.
Murphy said Trump edited his speech to include language he later tweeted on Jan. 6, 2021, including, “we don’t want to see our election victory stolen by an emboldened radical left. Our country has had enough. We won’t take it. We also added that together we will stop the theft.
Murphy said Trump continued his speech edits early in the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, and held a 25-minute phone call with that editor and senior adviser Stephen Miller.
“Following his call with Mr. Miller, President Trump inserted, for the first time, a line in his speech that read, ‘And we’ll see if Mike Pence goes down in history as a truly great and courageous leader. All it has to do is return illegally submitted electoral votes to states that received false and fraudulent information where they wish to recertify. No previous version of the speech had made any reference to Vice President Pence or his role during the Jan. 6 joint session,” Murphy noted.
She said, “These last-minute changes President Trump made to his speech were part of the President’s pressure campaign against his own Vice President.”
Murphy said Miller deleted the lines about Pence after having a conversation with White House attorney Eric Herschmann who objected to the president’s edits, according to Miller’s testimony.
Miller recalled Hershmann saying “something to the effect of thinking it would be counterproductive, I think he thought, to – discuss the matter publicly.”
Murphy said the speechwriters were advised to add Pence’s lines back into the speech after a “heated” phone call Trump had with Pence at 11:20 a.m. on Jan. 6, 2021, Murphy said.
Trump speechwriter Vincent Haley also recalled in his deposition to the committee that a “harsh phrase about the vice president” was added. When Trump gave the speech, he included several other references to Pence, according to the committee’s presentation.
“I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOS and the stupid people he listens to,” Trump said in one of the ad-libbed lines played by the committee.
In another off-the-cuff line, Trump called on his supporters to give “weak” Republicans “the kind of pride and boldness they need to take back our country.”
The committee also played dueling testimony presenting differing accounts of Ivanka Trump’s decision to attend the rally at the ellipse.
In her deposition, as released during the hearing, Ivanka Trump denied attending the rally in hopes of calming her father down as he was still overheated by his call with Pence.
However, Julie Radford, an aide to Ivanka Trump, told the committee that Ivanka “felt she could help calm things down, at least before he took the stage.”
“She shared that he called the vice president a no — an expletive word,” Radford told the committee. “I think it bothered her. And I think she could tell, based on the conversations and what was going on in the office, that he was angry and upset and that people were providing false information. .”
CNN’s Tierney Sne contributed to this report.
