Jan. 6 Committee Releases Testimony On Lines Cut From Trump’s Speech The Day After Capitol Riot Transcript

Speaker 1: (00:00)
New video released by committee member, Elaine Luria, just a few hours ago. In previously unseen testimony, members of Trump’s inner circle, including members of his own family, detail what Trump was and wasn’t willing to say in that video address made the day after January 6th.

Speaker 2: (00:18)
It looks like here that he crossed out that he was “directing the Department of Justice to ensure all law breakers are prosecuted to the full extent of the law. We must send a clear message not with mercy, but with justice. Legal consequences must be swift and firm.” Do you know why he wanted that crossed out?

Jared Kushner: (00:37)
No. I don’t know.

Pat Cipollone: (00:39)
And that needed to be stated forcefully. They did not represent him or his political views in any form or fashion.

Speaker 2: (00:56)
He also has crossed out, “I want to be very clear. You do not represent me. You do not represent our movement.” Do you know why he crossed that language out of the statement?

Jared Kushner: (01:07)
I don’t know.

Speaker 1: (01:10)
Add to that the suggestion that the committee could be on the verge of subpoenaing Jenny Thomas, wife of sitting Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. Here’s committee co-chair, Liz Cheney, on Sunday.

Liz Cheney: (01:22)
The committee is engaged with her council. We certainly hope that she will agree to come in voluntarily, but the committee is fully prepared to contemplate a subpoena if she does not. I hope it doesn’t get to that.

Speaker 1: (01:36)
The committee wants to talk to Thomas about her communications with people like Mark Meadows and John Eastman, as well as her attempts to convince Arizona lawmakers to help overturn the election. But Thomas isn’t the only one in the committee’s sights. According to Congresswoman Chaney, their list of potential witnesses includes members of the Secret Service, Trump campaign officials and even cabinet members who discussed invoking the 25th Amendment. So we’ve got a lot to discuss. Let me bring in NBC’s Capitol Hill Correspondent, Ali Vitali. With me here in studio NBC News Correspondent, Vaughn Hillyard. Also joining me, Pulitzer Prize winning staff writer for the Washington Post, Carol Leonnig, and Joyce Vance, a former US attorney and professor at the University of Alabama Law School. Let’s start with this new video, Ali, just released by Congresswoman Luria. Explain what that’s all about and why maybe it’s being put out now.

Ali Vitali: (02:27)
Well, look, this is a moment where the committee is going into a several-week pause before they pick up with hearings again in September. This may be sort of a reminder that there are still things that we have not yet seen that the committee has its hands on, including videos like this one, where they’re not just establishing that they have the remarks and the draft of the former president for those remarks he gave on January 7th, but also a little bit into the thought process of how they came together, the things that he was striking out and unwilling to say, for example, condemning the rioters as not indicative or representative of his movement or crossing out the fact that he wanted DOJ to leverage their full criminal prosecutorial power against these insurrectionists.

Ali Vitali: (03:09)
That gives a little bit more in insight into the mindset and the fact that you have people like Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, not only them, but then Pat Cipollone, the top white house lawyer, talking about what those edits mean gives a little bit more light into what the former president’s mindset might have been around that. And also gives a little bit more meat on the bone to where they left us on January 6th in their committee hearings, which brought us up in the timeline to the day of the insurrection and then gave us a little bit more of a sense of remarks that Trump gave on the 7th. All of this is meant to bolster the fact that they still have things on the cutting room floor that maybe we haven’t seen yet, but that we could end up seeing when they move forward in September with, what our reporting is, at least two more hearings.