Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) on Thursday evening implied former President Donald Trump is a domestic enemy as she gave her closing statement at the January 6th committee’s eighth hearing:
I first swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic. When I entered the U.S. Naval Academy at age 17, I spent two decades on ships at sea defending our nation from known and identifiable foreign enemies who sought to do us harm.
I never imagined that that enemy would come from within. I was not as prescient as Abraham Lincoln, who 23 years before the Civil War said, ‘If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and its finisher.’ Donald Trump was the author and we the people, for ourselves and our posterity should not let Donald Trump be the finisher.
Her closing statement came after about two-and-a-half hours of testimony, live and on video, of various White House staffers saying they believed that Trump needed to make a statement to his supporters to leave the Capitol on January 6 after some engaged in violence.
The committee members claimed throughout the hearing that Trump did nothing as the violence took place, but in the latter half of the hearing, they aired a video statement Trump delivered urging his supporters to go home in peace.
Still, Luria claimed that he only did so after it was “clear that his effort to violently disrupt or delay the counting of the election results had failed,” and complained that he had told his supporters to go home “affectionately.”
“That was not the message of condemnation and just punishment for those who broke the law that we expect from a president whose oath and duty is to ensure the laws are faithfully executed. But instead, it was his newest version of stand back and stand by,” she said.
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