In this image released in the final report by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022, President Donald Trump looks at video monitors showing the crowd gathered on the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, before he spoke. At rights is Ivanka Trump and second from right is Eric Trump. (House Select Committee via AP)
Donald Trump’s charges in Washington, D.C., for allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election may be on hold as Supreme Court justices consider his immunity argument, but the former president this week made an acknowledgment that could spark special counsel Jack Smith’s interest nonetheless.
At a campaign rally in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Trump told a crowd of his supporters that on Jan. 6, 2021, he did tell Robert “Bobby” Engel — then his head of security — that he wanted to go to the Capitol following his speech at the Ellipse. The detail was one the former president openly disparaged and discredited in 2022 after Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows, testified publicly to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol attack that she had learned Trump effectively tried to commandeer his armored vehicle by lunging toward an agent and grasping at the steering wheel.
“Its crazy stuff,” Trump said this week. “You know what I did say, I said I’d like to go down there because I see a lot of people are walking down. They said ‘sir, it’s better if you don’t.’ I said, ‘well I’d like to.””
Just ahead of this exchange, Trump had addressed a crowd gathered at the Ellipse and had told them: “I’ll be there with you, we’re going to walk down … you have to show strength and you have to be strong. We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated.”
Though acknowledging that he wanted to go the Capitol on Wednesday, he denied being handsy with the agent.
“I’m a lover, not a fighter,” he said.
Hutchinson testified under oath to Congress almost two years ago exactly that Engel and Anthony Ornato, a Secret Service agent turned deputy chief of staff of White House operations under Trump, both relayed to her what happened inside of the car, including Trump’s outrage when Engel would not comply due to security concerns.
“I’m the f—— president. Take me to the Capitol now!” he allegedly raged.
Many of Trump’s allies cast doubts on Hutchinson’s testimony and Ornato himself disputed it, but as The Washington Post unpacked in the wake of Hutchinson’s testimony, Ornato has a history of disputing key conversations related to Jan. 6 and has come under fire from onetime Trump officials for what they say are “outright” instances where he “lied” about them, too. As Law&Crime has previously reported, troves of Secret Service text messages dated Jan. 5 and 6, 2021, were erased.
Tony Ornato lied about me too. During the protests at Lafayette sq in 2020, I told Mark Meadows & Ornato they needed to warn press staged there before clearing the square. Meadows replied: “we aren’t doing that.” Tony later lied &said the exchange never happened. He knows it did.
— Alyssa Farah Griffin (@Alyssafarah) June 29, 2022
These details go to the heart of the indictment against Trump laid out in August 2023. Federal prosecutors highlighted in their allegations that Trump knew the “large and angry crowd” he had just addressed at the Ellipse could be “exploited” and encouraged to go to the Capitol to disrupt the certification through violence and intimidation.
As Smith noted, Trump had been up at 1 a.m. on Jan. 6 posting false proclamations about then-Vice President Mike Pence’s role in the certification and didn’t stop, even around 2:24 p.m., after his advisers, as the special counsel alleges, left him alone in the White House dining room to tweet: “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
This acknowledgment is also rather significant as it is not the first time Trump has appeared to throw cold water on his or his allies’ attempts to cast doubt on Hutchinson’s explosive testimony.
In April 2022, Trump told The Washington Post he would not have hesitated to go down to the Capitol with his supporters had it not been for the Secret Service.
“I would have gone there in a minute,” Trump said.
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