And while Trump never tried to make direct contact with Vice President Mike Pence, and angered Pence’s team, he did express concern about Pence to advisers who gathered in the dining room outside the Oval Office over the course of the afternoon. has, said General Keith Kellogg, who is among the the assistants around Trump.
Kellogg’s report comes amid conflicting reports about what the former president knew about the danger his vice president and members of Congress were on January 6 and when he knew it.
After Trump and his associates returned to the White House after lunch at the Ellipse, they gathered around the flat-screen television in the presidential dining room, according to the Kellogg, as his supporters stormed the Capitol.
Trump was angry with Pence at the time for telling him he would not try to overthrow the election results. The former president continued to focus on the election until noon.
As television images of rioters enter the Capitol and chase past security barriers, Trump pays homage to whether Pence is safe, according to Kellogg, who was Pence’s national security adviser but was with the president that day.
Aides told Trump that the vice president was under secret service control and taken to a safe place, Kellogg said.
“He was absolutely concerned about Pence,” he said of Trump. Kellogg was in touch with the vice president through Pence’s staff at the Capitol. They communicated with the White House and got the information to Kellogg.
Another person familiar with the situation confirmed Kellogg’s account to CNN.
Several sources told CNN Trump never tried to contact Pence directly.
At 14:24 ET, Trump tweeted that Pence did not have ‘courage’, a message that came minutes after the vice president was rushed off the Senate floor and to a safe place. People in the room said they did not fully understand how bad the situation was at the time the tweet was sent, as now seen afterwards.
In the subsequent minutes, however, the seriousness of the situation became clearer. Aid workers gathered in the dining room weighed how to respond, eventually convincing Trump to tweet for the protesters to be peaceful – a sentiment he initially resisted, another source familiar with the case said.
Another relevant source pushed back the characterization and said that it is a very dynamic environment and that several versions of the tweet have been passed on.
At one point, White House officials were made aware of a plan to evacuate Pence to the Andrews Joint Base, which never finally took place. Pence stayed at the Capitol and later returned to the Senate Hall to oversee the certification of the Electoral College.
The night before the January 6 rally, Trump separately heard protesters gather for the next day’s Oval Office rally, according to a person familiar with the matter. The energy of the crowd prompted Trump to ask what can be done to put lawmakers under maximum pressure to object to the certification of the Electoral College.
Aides told him that his speech would be the center of the day.
CNN’s Jamie Gangel contributed to this story.