A startling admission by the ex president that could very
well end up being a critical piece of evidence in
the cases against him.
We're talking about newly released audio of an interview with
Donald Trump by
ABC News's John Karl. It took place a little more
than two months after the January 6th insurrection.
It shows the ex president knew full well the power
he had over the mob that stormed the Capitol.
Just take a listen.
But if you look at the real size of that
crowd,
it was never reported correctly.
There were. It's the biggest crowd I've ever spoken in
front of by far,
really by far that went down to the Washington,
that went back to the Washington Monument.
You told them you were going to go up to
the Capitol where you just I was going to and
the Secret Service said
you can't. And then by the time I would have
and then when I get back,
I said I wanted to go back.
I was thinking about going back during the problem to
stop the problem doing it myself.
Secret Service didn't like that idea too much.
So, So what? I could have done that.
And you know what? I would have been very well
received.
Don't forget the people that went to Washington that day.
In my opinion, they went
because they thought the election was rigged.
That's why they went.
Trump's desire to go to the Capitol was fleshed out
in incredible detail by the January 6th Select Committee.
White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump was irate
when the Secret Service said he could not go to
the Capitol.
The president said something to the effect of
I'm the ****** president, take me up to the Capitol
now,
to which Bobby responded. Sir,
we have to go back to The West Wing.
The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle
to grab at the steering wheel.
Mr. Angle grabbed his arm,
said Sir, you need to take your hand off the
steering wheel.
We're going back to The West Wing,
We're not going to the Capitol.
Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards
Bobby Angle and Mr.
When Mr. Renato had recounted this story to me,
he had motion towards his clavicles.
Think about it. If Donald Trump felt comfortable joining a
mob that he reportedly knew was armed to the teeth,
it was because he knew that they were there because
of him.
Here's January 6th Rioter Stephen Ayers.
I was hanging on every word he was saying,
Everything he was putting out,
I was following it. I mean,
if I was doing it,
hundreds of thousands or millions
of other people are doing it or maybe even still
doing it.
So if the former president would have been quote,
well received by the rioters,
as he himself put it,
it follows that he could have called off the mob.
Instead what happened was with the January 6th Elect Committee
called
187 minutes of dereliction.
187 minutes after his speech at the Ellipse of the
White House,
he posted a video on Twitter calling for the mob
to go home,
during which Trump did nothing to stop the violence.
The comments a reminder of how the brutal violence at
the Capitol is an integral part of the story of
January 6th,
then integral part of the criminal case against Donald Trump.
The judge overseeing the federal election interference case weighing in
on this very issue today.
Judge Tanya Chuckin rejecting Trump's bid to get references to
the riot removed from the Jack Smith.
It's from Jack Smith's indictment and breaking in just the
last hour,
Speaker Mike Johnson announcing that security footage of the January
6th attack will be made available to the public.
That includes footage that was given to then Fox News
host Tucker Carlson by Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this year.
And that, and boy, is there a lot,
is where we start this hour,
with former lead investigator for the January 6th Select Committee,
Tim Hafey, and with me at the table,
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin and Molly Zhang,
Fast, host of the podcast Fast Politics,
as well as a special correspondent for Vanity Fair.
Tim, I want to start with you.
Your committee, you poured through this footage.
You took steps to make sure that the footage didn't
disclose sensitive security information.
Your reaction to Speaker Johnson's move today?
Yeah, it's dangerous. You know,
the Capitol Police gave it to us,
Alicia, with really strict conditions that we needed to clear
with them before we publicly showed any of that footage.
That's relevant because it demonstrates some events
in and around the Capitol.
There are security cameras posted all over the complex,
but the specific location of those cameras
is closely held law enforcement sensitive information.
And if they're all disclosed and a map can essentially
be recreated as to where they are,
that will make it easier for future
rioters who are intent on disrupting another joint session of
Congress or official proceeding to circumvent those cameras.
So it's really risky to just throw the doors open
and make them together without any protections,
right? There's the logistical piece of Molly.
There's also the fact that just this week you had
a Republican congressman
peddling conspiracy theories about what actually happened on January 6th,
trying to argue that the FBI was involved in January
6th.
You take this footage and you put it in the
hands of bad actors,
who knows where it goes well.
And I think it's a bit weird that Mike Johnson
is doing this.
He's recently become the Speaker of the House,
right? He was a sort of consensus candidate when they
kind of panicked after three weeks of Republicans not having
a speaker.
And also, he recently endorsed Donald Trump.
So you have to wonder,
is he doing this as like a campaign stunt or
is he doing this in his job as Speaker of
the House,
Right. This is not actually about governing and doing things.
A good question about motivation.
I love that you brought legal documents for us to
answer the question that you knew I would have about
how this becomes these claims from Donald Trump become legally
debunked, debunked. I think the claims become legally debunked because
of the
187 minutes. Let's start there.
So on this tape with Jon Karl,
Donald Trump is saying he could have stopped it.
And yet, Alicia, the evidence is as clear as day
that he didn't do anything to stop that through his
communications with anyone on the Hill or otherwise from the
White House. When he says I wanted to go there,
yes, we all know he wanted to go there.
And to Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony,
are we really supposed to believe that a person who
would reach up and throttle his own Secret Service agent,
then go there in peace a couple of hours later
to try to dissuade his supporters from tearing up the
Capitol?
I don't think so. And I don't think a jury
would buy that either.
I want to ask you,
Lisa, Breakdown Judge Chutkin's ruling for us.
I think Judge Chutkin's ruling is incredibly important,
but not necessarily for the reasons that people think You
might say,
well, why does it matter what's actually in the indictment
itself,
particularly if the jurors are not going to walk away,
and I'm holding the indictment,
if they're not going to walk away with this document
in their hands during deliberations,
it matters because that's still fair game for the prosecutors
to prove.
And as we know from a political article,
political article recently, that's the centerpiece of Jack Smith and
his teams case,
They want to put January 6th at the center of
Donald Trump's efforts to obstruct the official proceeding.
And there's a whole section of the indictment that's about
his exploitation of the violence and the chaos.
It's not just his inaction.
It's about how he laid the groundwork for that chaos
and then exploited it,
tweeting about Mike Pence at
2:24, as the indictment says,
a minute before he has to be evacuated.
The cause and effect is clear in the indictment,
and now prosecutors can make that a central part of
their presentation.
Judge Chutkin says Trump's filing makes,
quote, numerous inflammatory and unsupported accusations of its own.
Why do you think she felt need to write that?
I think she's trying to show that Trump is using
his filings for political theater
as much as he is using it to mount a
legal defense,
if not more so. And I think that's offensive to
her.
We're seeing that in the New York case as well,
where there's this sort of Pee Wee Herman,
I know you are, but what am I
thing going on, right? And she's calling him on it.
You're filing. Just as you're saying that these allegations need
to be stricken because they are inflammatory,
your filing is more inflammatory than anything they've said about
you.
You are trying to ratchet this up.
You are endangering people through your rhetoric,
which you call your defense,
which we have seen time and time again.
Tim Jack Smith said Trump's bid to strike references to
the violence from the indictment was a quote,
meritless effort to evade the indictments,
clear allegations that the defendant is responsible for the events
at the Capitol on January.
Talk to us. Lisa touched on that.
I want to tease it out more why the violence
on the 6th matters in terms of Donald Trump's criminal
exposure,
because they're the ultimate manifestation of his attempt to disrupt
a joint session.
He's charged specifically with intent to disrupt an official proceeding.
The violence is what interrupts the official proceeding.
It is the logical last step of his intentional multi
part plan to prevent the transfer of power.
That is the theory that the special counsel has charged.
And this notion that you should somehow separate the violence
at the Capitol because he isn't technically charged with assaulting
a police officer like a lot of the people who
have been charged is, is crazy because again,
you have to. You can only understand and what happened
at the Capitol as the logical last step of a
desperate plan.
Judge Chutkin logically saw through that there's no way to
try this case,
This conspiracy case, without reference to the violence
and his intent all along is made manifest by his
inaction over the course of those
187 minutes. This notion that he told John Karl I
could have gone down there and stopped it,
completely inconsistent with the consistent body of evidence we heard
from people inside the White House who said he didn't
do anything.
He could have picked up his phone and tweeted to
stop,
and he did not. To the contrary,
he resisted those efforts from his daughter,
from his chief of staff,
from his White House counsel.
He sat there and watched TV in the dining room
as people brawled as somebody was killed.
And for him now to say I could have gone
down there and stopped it,
it just belies the consistent body of evidence that we
developed that Jack Smith will present in court.
What do you make of his saying he thinks he
would have been well received by the rioters?
For Trump, there's so much ego.
And you even saw, I mean,
he's talking about a riot and he's like,
it's a huge crowd. It was arguing over crowd size,
right? I mean, and so I do think ultimately
he can't help himself. You know,
he tends to confess things as a sort of point
of pride.
We saw him politicize. You know,
these court hearings. He he sometimes does the wrong thing,
even not the politically smart thing.
So I do think that we'll see more of this
kind of braggadociousness.