Video outtakes of then-President Donald Trump’s address to his supporters on January 7, 2021, the day after the riot at the US Capitol, are in the custody of the House select committee looking into the uprising.
The outtakes, which were originally made public by The Washington Post, were produced for a speech Trump delivered the evening following the melee.
According to insiders with knowledge of the committee’s intentions, the panel is anticipated to release snippets from the outtakes on Thursday during its evening session.
In the outtakes, Trump can be seen struggling to concentrate while trying to record the message. Trump sought to label the rioters as Americans while refusing to declare the election results to be final. He also made a huge effort to avoid pointing any finger at them for misconduct.
The January 6 select committee’s spokesperson chose not to respond to questions about the outtakes.
The committee’s Democratic member from Maryland, Rep. Jamie Raskin, confirmed to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night that it has the outtakes and intends to show some of them at the meeting.
Raskin stated on “Anderson Cooper 360” that “The President demonstrated significant difficulties in concluding his speech.”
He said, “We’re going to let everyone view sections of it because it’s really illuminating how precisely he went about making those assertions.
The outtakes “will be significant in terms of what the President was willing to say and what he wasn’t willing to say,” Rep. Adam Schiff, another committee member, told CNN’s Don Lemon later that day.
The outtakes will be shown, according to the California Democrat “Everyone who is pleading with him to speak out or do something to halt the bloodshed. You will learn more about the President’s appalling silence as well as how he was eventually persuaded to speak up and what he was ready to say and what he wasn’t.”
The group intends to highlight Trump’s disregard for the unfolding disturbance in a wider presentation that will include the video recording outtakes as one component. The committee has stated that it will concentrate on the 187 minutes during which Trump stood by and did nothing as the Capitol was under attack. This has been referred to by some committee members as Trump’s “dereliction of duty.”