Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/605

 sooner. The President delayed. At 2:38 p.m., President Trump sent this tweet: "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" Sarah Matthews, the White House Deputy Press Secretary, told the Select Committee that President Trump resisted using the word "peaceful." The President added the words "Stay peaceful!" only after Ivanka Trump suggested the phrase. Trump, Jr. quickly recognized that his father's tweet was insufficient. "He's got to condem [sic] this shit. Asap. The captiol [sic] police tweet is not enough," Trump, Jr. wrote in a text to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. President Trump did not tell the rioters to disperse in either his 2:38 p.m. tweet, or another tweet at 3:13 p.m.

Multiple witnesses told the Select Committee that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy contacted the President and others around him, desperately trying to get him to act. McCarthy's entreaties led nowhere. "I guess they're just more upset about the election theft than you are," President Trump told McCarthy. Top lawyers in the White House Counsel's Office attempted to intercede. Two Fox News primetime personalities, always so obsequious, begged those around the President to get him to do more. But President Trump was unmoved.

There's no question that President Trump had the power to end the insurrection. He was not only the Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. military, but also of the rioters.

One member of the mob, Stephen Ayres, told the Select Committee that he and others quickly complied as soon as President Trump finally told them to go home. "[W]e literally left right after [President Trump's 4:17 p.m. video] come out. You know, to me if he would have done that earlier in the day, 1:30 [p.m.] … maybe we wouldn't be in this bad of a situation or something," Ayres said. Another rioter, Jacob Chansley, commonly referred to as the "QAnon Shaman," was one of the first 30 rioters to enter the U.S. Capitol. Chansley told a reporter that he left the building because "Trump asked everybody to go home." At 4:25 p.m., just eight minutes after President Trump tweeted his video, an Oath Keeper named Ed Vallejo messaged other members of his group, a fair number of whom were at the Capitol: "Gentleman [sic], Our Commander-in-Chief has just ordered us to go home. Comments?"

Even then, President Trump did not disavow the rioters. He endorsed their cause, openly sympathized with them, and repeated his Big Lie once again. "I know your pain, I know you're hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us," President Trump said at the beginning of his 4:17 p.m. video. "It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace. We have