A What I recall was seeing, seeing it and being shocked, saying we need to deescalate this—this is in the text messages, and it's verbally on video—and then climbing on a wet stack of metal chairs in which I could have fallen and injured myself, but it was more important to get the outskirts of the crowd. These people were not on the plaza, and they weren't on the building. These people were in a legally permissible area where there was not an event happening.
And we started chanting. We started yelling. We tried all types of tools that speakers use to get attention to say there's no event here. There's no event on the inauguration side. And so, these people were either new to Washington, D.C., new to the event, or had no idea about the Lot 8 event.
And my worst fears about The Ellipse event had happened. It's, like, people look at the scaffolding and they think there's going to be an event here. So I was, like, Okay. This is a simple mistake. Why don't we try to remedy it? Meanwhile there's—there's—there's tear gas in the air.
And I'm, like, okay. We are officially exiting this. We've got as many people as we can get with a megaphone. We need to move them away from the inauguration side. Don't defile the inauguration side. Don't be a part of scaffolding that could fall and hurt people. I was very concerned the scaffolding was going to fall and collapse on people.
Q On exhibit 26, can you go to page 256, please? And this is going to be around 2:34 at the time. There's an STS Patriots group. I'm assuming STS Patriots stands for Stop the Steal Patriots.
A Yes, sir.
Q And you say in one of these group chats, "Please let me know if anyone gets arrested. Civil War is," and then there's, like, a blank after that.
