After the storming of the Capitol in Washington, then-US President Donald Trump apparently refused to condemn the riots as strongly as possible.
Democratic member of the House of Representatives Elaine Luria published a three-and-a-half-minute video on Twitter, which is intended to show, among other things, a screenshot of a speech Trump was supposed to give the day after the storm.
A number of passages in which the voted-out president should have sharply distanced himself from the mob have been crossed out – apparently by Trump himself. Luria is a member of the parliamentary committee of inquiry that is working on the background to the storming of the Capitol.
Originally, the President should have said on January 7, 2021 that he had instructed the Justice Department to prosecute all offenders as severely as possible.
This sentence was deleted, as was the statement that the rioters did not represent the speaker, i.e. Trump.
Other passages have been significantly toned down.
For example, the handwritten phrase “And if you broke the law, you belong in prison” was changed to: “And if you broke the law, then you will pay for it.”
The video also shows a statement by Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the then President.
She says the document looks like a draft for the speech that day.
When asked if she could identify the handwriting, Trump said, "It looks like my father's handwriting." At the time of the Capitol attack, Ivanka Trump was a White House adviser.
Donald Trump is returning to Washington this Tuesday for the first time since the end of his term in office.
"He's going to give a political speech," Marc Lotter, spokesman for the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute, told CNN. Trump wanted to look to the future rather than the past.