'POTUS is pissed': Trump was livid Supreme Court rejected his challenge to election results
During Thursday’s Jan. 6 House select committee hearing, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., revealed a Secret Service memo from Dec. 11, 2020, detailing then-President Donald Trump’s reaction to the Supreme Court rejecting his campaign’s challenge to the 2020 election results. Additional testimony from Trump administration officials claimed that the former president had privately accepted his electoral loss prior to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Video Transcript
ADAM KINZINGER: At times, President Trump acknowledged the reality of his loss. Although he publicly claimed that he had won the election, privately he admitted that Joe Biden would take over as president. Here's a few examples of that.
MARK MILLEY: So we're in the Oval, and there's a discussion going on. And the president says, I think it's-- it could have been Pompeo, but he says words to the effect of, yeah, we lost, we need to let that issue go to the next guy, meaning President Biden.
ALYSSA FARAH: 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. And he was looking at the TV, and he said, can you believe I lost to this effing guy?
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: Mark raised it with me on the 18th. And so following that conversation where the motorcade ride driving back to the White House, I had said, look, does the president really think that he lost? And he said, you know, a lot of times he'll tell me that he lost, but he wants to keep fighting it. And he thinks that there might be enough to overturn the election. But, you know, he pretty much has acknowledged that he's lost.
ADAM KINZINGER: On December 11, Trump's allies lost a lawsuit in the US Supreme Court that he regarded as his last chance at success in the courts. A newly obtained Secret Service message from that day shows how angry President Trump was about the outcome. Quote, "Just FYI, POTUS is pissed. Breaking news, Supreme Court denied his lawsuit. He is livid now."
Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, was present for that conversation and described it in this way.
CASSIDY HUTCHINSON: This is the day that the Supreme Court had rejected that case. Mr. Meadows and I were in the White House residence at a Christmas reception. 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.
And so I was standing next to Mr. Meadows. But I stepped back. So I was probably two, three feet catty-corner or diagonal from him. The president was just raging about the decision, and how it's wrong, and why didn't we make more calls, and just his typical anger outburst at this decision. And the president said--
So he had 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.
