As his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence” on Jan. 6, 2021, Donald Trump ordered a Diet Coke while watching the horror unfold on TV.
That’s according to documents penned by Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team that were unsealed Friday, giving a smidge of new insight into how Trump allegedly spent the most infamous day of his presidency.
The unsealed documents included the redacted appendix of evidence Smith is using to prosecute Trump for his role in allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election. Included in those pages, of which there are hundreds, was a transcript of a conversation a White House staffer claimed to have had with Trump after he gave a speech at the Ellipse earlier that day.
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That transcript, which stemmed from a House Jan. 6 committee hearing, begins with the unnamed staffer recalling how he’d informed Trump that news networks had cut away from his speech to broadcast the “rioting down at the Capitol.”
The staffer then took off Trump‘s coat, set up a TV for him in the Oval Office dining room, and passed him the remote. Trump then began watching the news coverage of his speech—in which he commanded his supporters to “fight like hell”—and the ensuing riot.
Next, the staffer said, “I stepped out to get him a Diet Coke, come back in, and that’s pretty much it for me as he’s watching it, like, seeing it for himself.”
Much of the other documents released Friday were too redacted to decipher or included information that was already public. That included highlighted excerpts from Mike Pence’s book and infamous Trump social media posts, including writing that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”
Also included in the evidence were memos from lawyer John Eastman, which detailed a plan for Pence to reject the congressional certification of the 2020 election in order to keep Trump in power. But Pence refused to betray his constitutional oath.
Friday’s unsealing came a day after Judge Tanya Chutkan denied Trump’s last-minute request to delay the material’s release until after Election Day on Nov. 5. The GOP presidential nominee argued that the documents’ release would amount to election interference, but Chutkan disagreed.
“If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute—or appear to be—election interference,” Chutkan wrote in a decision late Thursday.
Trump‘s election subversion case has been mired in controversy and legal wrangling, fueled by the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump enjoys presidential immunity for official acts. Smith and his team are still pushing forward with charges against Trump by trying to prove he worked to overturn the election results in his personal capacity, not in his official role as president.
