Amna Nawaz
@PBSNewsHour·5.3M subscribers·62.2K videos
WATCH: Trump tweet attacking Pence was like ‘pouring gasoline on the fire,’ White House aide says
Posted
June 16, 2022
Views
50,780
Likes
643
Engagement
1.27%
June 16, 2022
50,780
643
1.27%
Every word spoken in this episode is indexed. Type any phrase to jump straight to the moment it was said.
Type any word or phrase that may have been spoken. Click a result to seek the player to that exact moment.
Try a name, a topic, or a quoted line
8:16Now PlayingDuring a Jan. 6 committee hearing on June 16, the committee played edited testimony from witnesses present in the White House as the Jan. 6 Capitol attack was underway.
The committee laid out how former Vice President Mike Pence came within 40 feet of rioters in the Capitol building while he was being evacuated. Just moments before, President Donald Trump sent out a tweet criticizing Pence for not taking action to overturn the election results.
According to testimony played during the hearing, former White House deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews testified that she and others believed “that was the last thing that needed to be tweeted.”
“The situation was already bad. So it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire,” she said in the committee’s presentation.
Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said Trump’s tweet inflamed the crowd.
“Our investigation found immediately after the 2:24 p.m. tweet, the crowds outside of the Capitol and inside the Capitol surged. The crowds inside the Capital were able to overwhelm law enforcement and the vice president was quickly evacuated from his ceremonial office to a secure location within the complex,” he said.
The hearing was the third of several planned by the Jan. 6 committee that focused on Trump’s efforts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to reject Congress' official count of Electoral College votes on the day of the attack. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day. The committee postponed a hearing scheduled for June 15 that was meant to focus on Trump's efforts to replace Attorney General Bill Barr, who did not support his claims of voter fraud after the election.
Stream your PBS favorites with the PBS app
Find more from PBS NewsHour at
Subscribe to our YouTube channel
Subscribe:
PBS NewsHour podcasts
Newsletters
Sentinel Indexing in Progress
Metadata and chapters are available. Claim extraction for this episode is pending.
All video content is delivered via YouTube embedded players in accordance with the YouTube Terms of Service. Sentinel provides research tools that promote discovery and accountability across political media.
