Page:Introductory Material to the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/98

 When the Committee asked Ivanka Trump whether there were “[a]ny particular words that you recall your father using during the conversation” that morning with Vice President Pence, she answered simply: “No.”

In several circumstances, the Committee has found that less senior White House aides had significantly better recollection of events than senior staff purported to have.

The Select Committee also has concerns regarding certain other witnesses, including those who still rely for their income or employment by organizations linked to President Trump, such as the America First Policy Institute. Certain witnesses and lawyers were unnecessarily combative, answered hundreds of questions with variants of “I do not recall” in circumstances where that answer seemed unbelievable, appeared to testify from lawyer-written talking points rather than their own recollections, provided highly questionable rationalizations or otherwise resisted telling the truth. The public can ultimately make its own assessment of these issues when it reviews the Committee transcripts and can compare the accounts of different witnesses and the conduct of counsel.

One particular concern arose from what the Committee realized early on were a number of intentional falsehoods in former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s December 7, 2021 book, The Chief’s Chief. Here is one of several examples: Meadows wrote, “When he got offstage, President Trump let me know that he had been speaking metaphorically about going to the Capitol.” Meadows goes on in his book to claim that it “was clear the whole time” President Trump didn’t intend to go to the Capitol. This appeared to be an intentional effort to conceal the facts. Multiple witnesses directly contradicted Meadows’s account about President Trump’s desire to travel to the Capitol, including Kayleigh McEnany, Cassidy Hutchinson, multiple Secret Service agents, a White House employee with national security responsibilities and other staff in the White House, a member of the Metropolitan Police and others. This and several other statements in the Meadows book were false, and the Select Committee was concerned that multiple witnesses might attempt to repeat elements of these false accounts, as if they were the party line. Most witnesses did not, but a few did.

President Trump’s desire to travel to the Capitol was particularly important for the Committee to evaluate because it bears on President Trump’s intent on January 6th. One witness account suggests that President Trump even wished to participate in the electoral vote count from the House floor, standing with Republican Congressmen, perhaps in an effort to apply further pressure to Vice President Mike Pence and others.

Mark Meadows’s former Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Anthony Ornato gave testimony consistent with the false account in Meadows’s book. In particular, Ornato told the Committee that he was not aware of a genuine push by the President to go to the Capitol, suggesting instead that “it was one of those hypotheticals from the good idea fairy. . . [b]ecause it’s ridiculous to think that a President of the United States can travel especially with, you know, people around just on the street up to the Capitol and peacefully protest outside the Capitol. . ..” He told the Select Committee that the only conversation he had about the possibility of the President traveling to the Capitol was in a single meeting officials