Trump’s Dubious Claim About ‘Hidden’ Tweets Exonerating Him for Jan. 6 Capitol Attack
Now that Twitter and Facebook have reinstated Donald Trump’s accounts, the former president says two Jan. 6, 2021, tweets that the “highly partisan January 6th Committee” tried to hide have now been “fully restored” and “fully exonerate me.” But the posts — which called for demonstrators at the U.S. Capitol to be “peaceful” — were discussed at length in the committee’s final report.
The tweets in question came about 25 minutes after rioters had breached the Capitol, and the final report from the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol noted that by the time Trump issued the first of the two tweets, “Fox News was showing video of the chaos and attack, with tear gas filling the air in the Capitol Rotunda.”
Rather than exonerating the president, the report states, “Almost everyone, including staff in the White House also found the President’s 2:38 p.m. and 3:13 p.m. tweets to be insufficient because they did not instruct the rioters to leave the Capitol.” The report provided testimony and documents to support its claim that the tweets were considered “insufficient,” and that Trump resisted telling his supporters to leave.
Nonetheless, in a 10-page “on the witch hunt of Jan. 6,” which Trump on Feb. 14, he describes the social media posts as “new
