Raskin: Jan. 6 panel will show Trump tweet ‘mobilized dangerous extremists’

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who sits on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol rioting, said that the panel on Tuesday would show how a tweet from former President Trump “mobilized dangerous extremists & white nationalist groups” on the day of the breach.

The Maryland Democrat late Monday tweeted out a screenshot of a statement Trump made on Twitter on Dec. 19, 2020, in which the former president said, “Peter Navarro releases 36-page report alleging election fraud  ‘more than sufficient’ to swing victory to Trump … A great report by Peter. Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

“When he sent this tweet, Trump became the first president in American history to call for a protest against the peaceful transfer of power,” Raskin said.

“At tomorrow’s hearing, America will see how it mobilized dangerous extremists & white nationalist groups to come armed to ‘Stop the Steal,’” he added.

The House select committee will hold their latest hearing on Tuesday afternoon. It will examine Trump’s tweet and how it was interpreted by extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys as a call-to-action to keep the former president in power. 

One day before Trump sent out the tweet, the idea of seizing voting machines in certain states had been advocated for by allies of the former president’s during a White House meeting, though the idea would ultimately never be pursued. 

“And then, just an hour or two later, Donald Trump sent out the tweet that would be heard around the world, the first time in American history when a president United States called a protest against his own government, in fact, to try to stop the counting of Electoral College votes in a presidential election he had lost,” Raskin told CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“Absolutely unprecedented, nothing like that had ever happened before. So people are going to hear the story of that tweet, and then the explosive effect it had in Trump World and specifically among the domestic violent extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country.”

The committee’s last hearing included testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson offered insight into how people within the White House orbit knew that Jan. 6 could take a turn for the worse and how badly Trump wanted to go to the Capitol on the day of the riot.