A tweet by former United States President Donald Trump apparently led the members of right-wing militia groups and other supporters to stage the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol. Lawmakers said on Tuesday (July 12) that the particular tweet by Trump is seen as a “call to arms”.
On January 6, the members of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers stormed Congress along with thousands of other Trump loyalists. It was an apparent attempt to block certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory. Without giving any proof, Trump has claimed multiple times that the election was marred by fraud.
The incident is being probed by a House select committee. The latest hearing from the committee attempted to flesh out links between Trump and the far-right extremist groups.
The House committee made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans examined the impact of a tweet that Trump sent on December 19, 2020. In the tweet, Trump had urged his supporters to descend on Washington on January 6 for a rally he promised would be “wild.”
The tweet was sent a little more than an hour after Trump met at the White House with his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, former general Mike Flynn, and Sidney Powell, another attorney, for a strategy meeting that one aide described as “unhinged.”
Committee member Jamie Raskin said that Trump’s “1:42 am tweet electrified and galvanized his supporters, especially the dangerous extremists in the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys and other racist and white nationalist groups spoiling for a fight against the government.”
Representative Stephanie Murphy, another committee member, said the tweet “served as a call to action, and in some cases as a call to arms, for many of President Trump’s most loyal supporters.”
Trump tried to contact witness
In an explosive revelation, representative Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the House committee investigating the attack on Congress, said that the 76-year-old Trump had recently attempted to contact a committee witness.
The witness, who was not identified, did not take the call from Trump and alerted their lawyer, Cheney said, adding that the committee has “supplied that information to the Department of Justice.”
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