Texts show top Trump defenders’ private alarm on Jan. 6

WASHINGTON — As a mob overran the U.S. Capitol last January, some of Donald Trump’s highest-profile defenders in the media — and even his own son — sent urgent text messages to the White House chief of staff urging him to get the then-president to do more to stop the violence. He is destroying his legacy.” But on her show the evening of Jan. 6, Ingraham cited false claims that the rioters included leftist provocateurs, saying, “They were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports Antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd.” She added: “If you are a Trump supporter hoping to display your support for the president, well, today’s antics at the Capitol did just the opposite.” Ingraham also made a false assertion that there were “legitimate concerns” that voter fraud potentially marred the 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden, but she noted, “That never should have lent any license to violence or other chaos.” Ingraham has since repeatedly downplayed the Jan. 6 attack. Instead, she said, “The real threat to our future is Biden, and the well-heeled, powerful forces who want us to lose sight of what made America great in the first place.” During a March phone interview with Trump, Ingraham asked him: “Are you concerned that the U.S. Capitol, after Jan. 6, has become a fortress, protecting the Capitol from the people who are supposed to actually be the ones in charge here, not the people who are sitting in the Capitol?” She then didn’t object when Trump said the mob posed “zero threat” and suggested that authorities were “persecuting a lot of those people” for being a part of it. How did they allow the Capitol building to be breached in what seemed like less than a few minutes?” During his show on Monday, Hannity called the House committee investigating the attack a “Democrat sham” and a “waste of your time and money.” He also falsely said Trump had pushed for extra Capitol protection before Jan. 6 but was denied by Pelosi. “And on this program, we strongly condemn the violence on Jan. 6 just like we condemned all of the violent riots in the summer of 2020.” Hannity called Cheney reading his Meadows text “a weak attempt to smear yours truly and, presumably I guess, President Trump,” and argued that what he wrote was consistent with what he said on the air the day of the Capitol attack.