Jan. 6 hearing focuses on how extremists answered Trump's 'call to arms'

The Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday focused on ways violent far-right extremists answered Donald Trump's tweet for a big Washington rally as a "call to arms," as the panel probed whether they co-ordinated with White House allies in the deadly U.S. Capitol attack and effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol is delving into what it calls the final phase of Trump's multi-pronged effort to halt Joe Biden's victory. As dozens of lawsuits and false claims of voter fraud fizzled, Trump met late into the night of Dec. 18 with attorneys at the White House before tweeting the rally invitation — "Be there, will be wild!"

Members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups who are now facing rare sedition charges readily answered the invitation.

"This tweet served as a call to action — and in some cases a call to arms," said one panel member, Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla.

Tuesday's hearing was the seventh for the Jan. 6 committee. Over the past month, the panel has created a narrative of a defeated Trump "detached from reality," clinging to false claims of voter fraud and working feverishly to reverse his election defeat. It all culminated with the attack on the Capitol, the committee says.

The panel featured new video testimony from Pat Cipollone, Trump's former White House counsel, recalling the explosive late-night meeting at the White House when Trump's outside legal team brought a draft executive order to seize states' voting machines — a "terrible idea," he said.

"That's not how we do things in the United States," Cipollone testified.

He and other White House officials scrambled to intervene in the late-night meeting Trump was having with attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, retired national security aide Michael Flynn and the head of the online retail company Overstock. It erupted in shouting and screaming, another aide testified.

"Where is the evidence?" Cipollone demanded about the false claims of voter fraud.

"What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts," testified another White House official, Eric Herschmann.

But Trump was intrigued and essentially told his White House lawyers that at least Powell and outside allies were trying to do something.

"You guys are not tough enough," Giuliani in video testimony recalled the president telling the White House attorneys. "You guys are p-----s," he said, using crass language.

As night turned to morning, Trump tweeted the call for supporters to come to Washington on Jan. 6, when Congress would be tallying the Electoral College results. He wrote, "Be there, will be wild!"

Immediately, the extremists reacted.