“The carnage was impossible to deny. As the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol laid out its evidence that former President Donald Trump was the catalyst of the assault on American democracy, a 12-minute video showed the full consequences of Trump’s willful lie that the election was stolen. It was perhaps the committee’s most compelling argument.
The video — which included images recorded by participants in the attack, security footage, news footage, audio recordings from police radio communication and police body-camera recordings — tracked the evolution of the violence on that day, from an agitated crowd gathering at the outskirts of the Capitol, through the bloody, forceful invasion of the building. Much of the footage was raw and played at length; the violence was visceral. In one clip, a first-person view from a fallen U.S. Capitol Police officer’s body camera, you can see the mob bearing down, beating the officer mercilessly.
You can watch as many clips of Jan. 6 participants calmly strolling through the rotunda as you like, but the footage shared during the hearing make it inarguable that this was no “normal tourist visit,” as GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde claimed four months after the attack.”
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“Videos — some previously released, others being aired for the first time — were carefully sprinkled throughout the hearing, punctuating information shared by Cheney and committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson. Even in his opening remarks, Thompson included video to underscore the fact that the 2020 election was not stolen from Trump, signaling how big a role media would play in the hearings to come. Warning that the clip contained “strong language,” Thompson paused his remarks to play a clip from former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony to the committee, where Barr said he remembers at least three discussions with the president where “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.”
Later, clips of testimony from Trump’s daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner, another senior White House adviser, demonstrated that those closest to the former president were aware that his claims of fraud were baseless. Video testimony of defendants charged for their alleged involvement in the attack saying that they were in Washington, D.C., that day because Trump had summoned them underscored the president’s role in inspiring the attack. Footage of Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer on the front lines that day, being knocked unconscious after the mob plowed past a barricade toward her punctuated her live testimony on how violent Jan. 6 was.”