CNN’s Jim Acosta and ABC’s Jonathan Karl were among the journalists who sent text messages to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Karl, a longtime reporter and anchor at ABC News, texted Meadows at 2:53 p.m. that day and asked him “What are you going to do to stop this? What is the president going to do?” CNN reported this week.
“I was asking a question as a reporter who wanted to know what was happening inside the White House as the Capitol was being attacked,” Karl told the outlet. “But I was also asking as an American horrified by what I was witnessing.”
A mob of supporters of former President Trump had overcome police and entered the Capitol well before Karl’s texts, forcing the evacuation of Congress during a joint session to certify President Biden’s win in the election.
Acosta, a former White House correspondent at CNN and now a weekend host on the network, also texted Meadows that day, asking him “Will potus say something to tamp things down?”
Thousands of text messages to and from Meadows have been handed over to the House select committee investigating the attack. They show a number of other journalists, lobbyists and lawmakers either attempting to gain insight into how the White House was handling the attack or urging Meadows to get Trump to respond.
Just after 4 p.m. Trump tweeted a short video message asking the rioters to go home.
Meadows’s communications that day have been a key focus of the committee’s investigation. Late last year, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during a hearing on the attack read into the congressional record a number of text messages sent to Meadows from Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, two top hosts at Fox News.