Jan. 6
Panel Hearings
Documentary Filmmaker Emerges as Potentially Key
Jan. 6 Witness
Maggie
Haberman
June 23,
2022, 11:20 a.m. ETJune 23, 2022
June 23,
2022
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/us/politics/alex-holder-jan-6-trump-documentary.html
Alex
Holder, a British documentary filmmaker who had extensive access to President
Donald J. Trump and his family ahead of and after the 2020 election, has emerged
late in the House’s investigation of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as
a new and potentially important witness.
Mr. Holder
testified behind closed doors on Thursday morning before the House committee
investigating Mr. Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the election he
lost. His deposition took place ahead of a separate public hearing by the
committee on Thursday about Mr. Trump’s effort to install a loyalist to run the
Justice Department in the closing weeks of his administration.
Mr.
Holder’s footage — some 11 hours of it with the Trump family discussing the
campaign and the election for a planned documentary called “Unprecedented” —
was subpoenaed by the committee ahead of the interview.
Precisely
what the footage shows is still unclear. But Mr. Holder interviewed Mr. Trump
once before the Jan. 6 riot and twice after Jan. 6, meaning he potentially can
speak to Mr. Trump’s state of mind and whether he made clear he knew he had
lost the election.
In an
interview with The New York Times after his testimony, Mr. Holder said the
committee’s investigators asked very specific questions about his footage and
his experience with the Trump family. But he declined to provide a detailed
account of what the committee’s questions had focused on.
Mr. Holder
said he went into his interviews with Mr. Trump believing that the president
could not actually believe what he was saying about the election but ended up
being persuaded otherwise.
“After that
interview, I remember being struck by how wrong I was,” he said. “He 100
percent believed the election was taken from him.”
He declined
to say what Mr. Trump revealed about his thinking about the attack on the
Capitol by his supporters. But in a video clip shared with The Washington Post,
and confirmed by a person with access to it, Mr. Trump said his supporters that
day “were angry from the standpoint of what happened in the election because
they’re smart, and they see. And they saw what happened. I believe that that
was a big part of what happened on Jan. 6.”
One person
close to the Trump family said that they had believed they would have some
editorial control over the project, which Mr. Holder denied.
Mr. Holder
interviewed Mr. Trump’s oldest children; his son-in-law and senior adviser,
Jared Kushner; Vice President Mike Pence; and a few others for the project. One
person familiar with the interviews said Mr. Pence’s team was approached by
Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, about participating.
Mr. Holder
said later through a spokesman that no Trump family member or representative
was paid for the footage.
It is
unclear how they are portrayed. Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., sat
with the filmmaker three weeks before Election Day, but he turned down a
request for another interview after the election, a person familiar with the
filming said. People close to the family signaled they were concerned that the
Trumps, who were not particularly invested in the project, were not paying
enough attention to what they said on camera, and that their remarks could look
different in hindsight after Jan. 6.
The footage
with the family could also be revealing. The Times was shown a short clip of
Ivanka Trump, the former president’s elder daughter, discussing her view of her
father’s repeated false claims that the election was stolen through widespread
fraud. The clip was played for The Times by someone with access to it.
That video
was recorded on Dec. 10, 2020, after Mr. Trump had been making the baseless
fraud claims for weeks. In the clip, Ms. Trump said, “I think that, as the
president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be
heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless.”
She said
that “a lot of Americans feel very, very disenfranchised right now, and really,
question the sanctity of our elections, and that’s not right, it’s not
acceptable.”
“He has to
take on this fight,” she said. “Look, you fight for what you love the most and
he loves this country and he loves this country’s people, and he wants to make
sure that their voice is, is heard and not muted.” Mr. Trump “will continue to
fight until every legal remedy is exhausted, and that’s what he should do,” Ms.
Trump said.
Making a
case against Trump. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack appears
to be laying out evidence that could
allow prosecutors to indict former President Donald J. Trump, though the path
to a criminal trial is uncertain. Here are the main themes that have emerged so
far:
An
unsettling narrative. During the first hearing, the committee described in
vivid detail what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by the
former president that culminated in the assault on the Capitol. At the heart of
the gripping story were three main players: Mr. Trump, the Proud Boys and a
Capitol Police officer.
Creating
election lies. In its second hearing, the panel showed how Mr. Trump ignored
aides and advisers as he declaredg victory prematurely and relentlessly pressed
claims of fraud he was told were wrong. “He’s become detached from reality if
he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general,
said of Mr. Trump during a videotaped interview.
Pressuring
Pence. Mr. Trump continued pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to go along
with a plan to overturn his loss even after he was told it was illegal,
according to testimony laid out by the panel during the third hearing. The
committee showed how Mr. Trump’s actions led his supporters to storm the
Capitol, sending Mr. Pence fleeing for his life.
Fake
elector plan. The committee used its fourth hearing to detail how Mr. Trump was
personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors. The panel also
presented fresh details on how the former president leaned on state officials
to invalidate his defeat, opening them up to violent threats when they refused.
Strong
arming the Justice Department. During the fifth hearing, the panel explored Mr.
Trump’s wide-ranging and relentless scheme to misuse the Justice Department to
keep himself in power. The panel also presented evidence that at least half a
dozen Republican members of Congress sought pre-emptive pardons.
The timing
of the video, and her comments in it, are notable because she was shown in
videotaped testimony before the House committee saying that she had “accepted”
statements by Attorney General William P. Barr, including on Dec. 1, 2020, that
there had been no widespread fraud.
“I
certainly noted the sort of differences of position,” Mr. Holder said of the
video footage of Ms. Trump that the committee played. He said he was “unsure”
of whether Ms. Trump believed her father had lost or won.
“But with
respect to what she said vis-à-vis what he should do, she was very clear,” Mr.
Holder said of his interview with her. “It was consistent with what sort of she
and her siblings have said about their father. They love their father, and they
admire him immensely, and they sort of give the impression that they would do
everything they can to help support him. They definitely gave me that
impression, not necessarily just the election, but in general.”
Mr. Holder
also said he was with Mr. Pence when Mr. Pence received an email about the 25th
Amendment, which is used to remove a president from office, although it was
unclear who sent it or what time of day he received it. The footage disclosing
the email was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
However, a
senior aide to Mr. Pence said the footage that Mr. Holder had shown people did
not accurately portray what was happening in that moment. In reality, the aide
said, it was Mr. Pence reacting to his own letter rejecting the call for the
25th Amendment from Speaker Nancy Pelosi being sent to Congress on Jan. 12,
2021.
To the
extent that there is other footage with the Trump family discussing its views
of the election, or the campaign’s efforts to fight Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s
victory, it could be significant to the committee’s investigation.
Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the panel’s
chairman, cited the access to the footage as a reason for delaying additional public
hearings that the panel was expected to hold next week; those sessions have now
been pushed into July.
The
filmmaker was connected to Mr. Kushner through Jason D. Greenblatt, a former
lawyer for the Trump Organization who became Mr. Trump’s White House envoy to
the Middle East. The documentary was envisioned as a legacy project for Mr.
Trump and, by extension, his family. Mr. Greenblatt forwarded questions that he
said the filmmaker wanted to cover to some of the Trump family members.
But few if
any senior campaign officials were told of it, and several were stunned when
they learned it existed after Politico reported this week that the footage had
been subpoenaed.
The footage
was used for a series that is to be streamed by Discovery+ this summer.
Maggie
Haberman is a White House correspondent. She joined The Times in 2015 as a
campaign correspondent and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018
for reporting on President Trump’s advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT
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