Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy said that former President Donald Trump made “last-minute edits” to his Jan. 6, 2021 speech from the Ellipse while listening to a rally attended by far-right extremists held near the White House on the evening of Jan. 5, 2021.
“Based on documents we have received from the National Archives, including multiple draft of the Presidents’ speech, as well as from witness testimony, we understand how that speech devolved into a call to action and call to fight,” Murphy said.
Murphy said that Trump edited his speech to include language that he later tweeted on Jan. 6, 2021, including, “we don’t want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore. We also added, together we will stop the steal.”
Murphy said that Trump continued edits to his speech early into the morning of Jan. 6, 2021 and held a 25-minutes phone call with this chief speech writer and senior adviser Stephen Miller.
“Following his call with Mr. Miller, President Trump inserted, for the first time, a line in his speech that said, ‘And we will see whether Mike Pence enters history as a truly great and courageous leader. All he has to do is refer the illegally submitted electoral votes back to the states that were given false and fraudulent information where they want to recertify.’ No prior versions of the speech had referenced Vice President Pence or his role during the joint session on Jan. 6,” Murphy noted.
She said, “These last-minute edits by President Trump to his speech were part of the President’s pressure campaign against his own vice president.”
Murphy said that Miller removed the lines about Pence after having a conversation with White House lawyer Eric Herschmann who objected to the President’s edits, according to testimony from Miller.
Miller recalled Hershmann saying “something to the effect of thinking that it would be counterproductive, I think he thought, to – to discuss the matter publicly.”
Murphy said that the speech writers were advised to add the Pence 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 committee deposition that a “tough sentence about the Vice President” was added. When Trump gave the speech, it included several more references to Pence, according to the committee’s presentation.
“I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOS and the stupid people that he’s listening to,” Trump said in one of the ad-libbed lines played by the committee.
In another improvised line, Trump called on his supporters to give “weak” Republicans “the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
The committee also played dueling testimonies showcasing differing accounts of Ivanka Trump’s decision to attend the rally at the ellipse.
In her deposition, as played during the hearing, Ivanka Trump denied that she attended the rally in the hopes of cooling down her father because he was still overheated from his call with Pence.
However, Julie Radford, an aide to Ivanka Trump, told the committee that Ivanka “felt like she might be able to help calm the situation down, at least before he went onto stage.”
“She shared that he had called the Vice President a not — an expletive word,” Radford told the committee. “I think that 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 people were providing misinformation.”
CNN’s Tierney Sne contributed to this report.
