Donald Trump Reportedly Craved His Favorite Soda During Capitol Insurrection – The Daily Beast

As his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”, Donald Trump ordered a Diet Coke as he watched the horror unfold on television.

That's according to documents from special counsel Jack Smith's team that were unsealed on Friday, providing a hint of new insight into how Trump allegedly spent the most infamous day of his presidency.

Among the unsealed documents was the redacted appendix containing evidence Smith is using to prosecute Trump for his role in the alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Included in these pages, of which there are hundreds, was a transcript of a conversation a White House staffer allegedly had with Trump after he gave a speech at the Ellipse earlier in the day.

This transcript, from a House committee hearing on January 6, begins with the unnamed aide recalling how he informed Trump that news networks had interrupted his speech to report the “riots down at the Capitol.” to transfer.

The aide then took off Trump's coat, set up a television for him in the Oval Office dining room and handed him the remote control. Then Trump began tracking new coverage of his speech — in which he ordered his supporters to “fight like hell” — and the insurrection that followed.

Next, the employee said, “I went out to get him a Diet Coke, then came back in, and that was it for me while he looked at it, with his own eyes, so to speak.”

Many of the other documents released Friday were too redacted to decipher or contained information that was already public. These included highlighted excerpts from Mike Pence's book and infamous Trump social media posts, including the statement that Pence “did not have the courage to do what should have been done.”

The evidence also included memos from attorney John Eastman detailing how Pence should oppose Congress' certification of the 2020 election to keep Trump in power. But Pence refused to break his constitutional oath.

Friday's unsealing came a day after Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected Trump's last-minute request to delay the release of the material until after Election Day on Nov. 5. The Republican presidential candidate argued that releasing the documents amounted to election interference, but Chutkan disagreed.

“If the court withholds information that the public would otherwise have a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of its release, that withholding could itself constitute, or appear to be, election interference,” Chutkan wrote late Thursday in a decision.

Trump's election subversion case is mired in controversy and litigation, fueled by the Supreme Court's ruling that Trump enjoys presidential immunity for official acts. Smith and his team are still pressing forward with the case against Trump, trying to prove that he worked to overturn the election results in his personal capacity and not in his official role as president.