Former President Donald Trump was noticeably angry when the Supreme Court rejected his challenge to the results of the 2020 election and did not want people to know he lost, new evidence and testimony presented by the Jan. 6 committee on Thursday revealed.
In a Secret Service email obtained and presented by the committee, a special agent warned other members of Trump’s ire.
“Just fyi. POTUS is pissed,” reads the message dated Dec. 11, 2020. “[B]reaking news – Supreme Court denied his law suit. He is livid now.”
At a hearing on Capitol Hill, the House select committee also presented new videotaped testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who witnessed Trump’s furor the day that the Supreme Court rejected his appeal.
“Mr. Meadows and I were in the White House residence at a Christmas reception,” Hutchinson said. “And as we were walking back from the Christmas reception that evening, the president was walking out of the Oval Office so we crossed paths in the Rose Garden colonnade.
“The president was fired up about the Supreme Court decision,” Hutchinson said.
She stepped back a few feet, but could hear Trump “raging about the decision, and how it’s wrong, and, ‘Why didn’t we make more calls?’ Just his typical anger, outburst at this decision.”
According to Hutchinson, Trump “said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.’”
Trump has never publicly conceded his election loss to Joe Biden. But additional testimony from Trump administration officials presented by the committee Thursday showed that the former president had privately accepted his defeat prior to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“So we’re in the Oval and there’s a discussion going on,” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in his testimony. “And the president says, I think it could have been [former Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo, but he says words to the effect of, ‘Yeah we lost, we need— we need to let that issue go to the next guy,’ meaning President Biden.”
“I remember maybe a week after the election was called, I popped into the Oval just to like give the president the headlines and see how he was doing,” Alyssa Farah, the former White House director of strategic communications, told the committee. “And he was looking at the TV, and he said, ‘Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?’”
Thursday’s hearing was the House select committee’s 10th public presentation stemming from its 15-month investigation into the events surrounding the Capitol insurrection.
The committee has used the televised hearings to shine a light on what Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., its co-chair, has called former Trump’s “sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”
Read More: Trump was ‘livid’ Supreme Court rejected challenge to election results, Secret Service agent warned