At some point in the days before the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, President Donald Trump looked at a piece of paper. On it was a draft tweet focused on the speech he would give that morning, encouraging people to attend. The paper, turned over to the National Archives and then the House select committee investigating the riot, is stamped with three words: “President has seen.”

It’s an interesting insight into Trump’s process for releasing messages on social media, certainly. But the reason this particular piece of paper is important — important enough to warrant inclusion in the House committee’s hearing Tuesday — is that it included a supplication that wasn’t otherwise included in Trump’s messaging to his base.

“I will be making a Big Speech at 10AM on January 6th,” it read, with the characteristically idiosyncratic capitalization he favors. A bit later, the key component: “March to the Capitol after.”

The tweet wasn’t sent. But it is an indication of how early Trump and his team were considering such a march, a dramatic escalation of the threat posed to the Capitol and one that his attorneys had reportedly opposed robustly.

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Why the “march” itself (really an informal movement of the crowd gathered for Trump’s speech outside the White House to Capitol Hill) mattered is obvious but important to articulate. The Capitol was overrun largely because of scale. Law enforcement on-site was unable to hold back thousands of furious Trump supporters. It was a magnitude of force that some, such as members of the Proud Boys, saw as important to being able to influence what occurred that day. The first barriers to the Capitol were overrun before the crowd from his speech at the Ellipse arrived. But the Capitol itself wasn’t breached until it did.

Soon after the riot, the question of when the movement from the Ellipse to the Capitol was first considered arose. There was no permit for a march between the two sites, despite long-standing plans that included elements both outside the White House and at the Capitol. Organizers connected to the umbrella group planning the speech at the Ellipse indicated that there was internal debate about whether a march should be explicitly advocated. Dustin Stockton, one of those organizers, said he learned that the no-march side had lost only when Trump explicitly advocated for a march during his speech.

In testimony before the House committee last week, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson explained how strongly Trump’s attorneys objected to his taking this approach.

“Eric Herschmann said something to the effect of, ‘Please make sure we don’t go up to the Capitol,’ ” Hutchinson said of one of Trump’s attorneys. “‘We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.’ ” White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Hutchinson testified, “worried that it would look like we were inciting a riot or encouraging a riot to erupt at the Capitol.”

That the Trump tweet about a march was never sent suggests that he and/or his team had received the message that this should not be part of the plan. But the Jan. 6 committee revealed other evidence that the White House was quietly planning for a march to be part of the day’s activity.

Kylie Kremer is one of the leaders of the group Women for America First, which led on the Jan. 6 activity. On the day of Trump’s tweet encouraging people to come to Washington — “will be wild!” — Kremer promoted her organization’s plans for Jan. 6, including a “march for Trump.”

The calvary is coming, Mr. President! JANUARY 6th | Washington, DChttps://t.co/kyp7WF8o5r 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸#MarchForTrump #StopTheSteal pic.twitter.com/A6VkNZPlPx

Details hadn’t yet been worked out, but on Jan. 1, Trump retweeted Kremer’s appeal.

On Jan. 4, Kremer reached out to stalwart Trump ally Mike Lindell, CEO of the company MyPillow. A text message obtained by the House committee read:

Another message from Ali Alexander, leader of the “Stop the Steal” effort after the election, described the plan for Jan. 6. “Tomorrow: Ellipse, then US Capitol,” the message, obtained by the committee, read. “Trump is supposed to order us to capitol at the end of his speech, but we will see.” Alexander, too, had rushed to put together a plan in response to Trump’s “wild” tweet, quickly registering “WildProtest.com.” That protest, intended for Capitol Hill, was folded into the broader day of action.

But, again, Trump wasn’t supposed to push people to the Capitol — until he simply decided to do so during his speech. The speech evolved in the hours before Trump gave it, but it evolved further as he gave it.

“A single, scripted reference to rallygoers marching to the Capitol became four,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) said during Tuesday’s hearing, “with President Trump ad-libbing that he would be joining protesters at the Capitol.”

One witness at the hearing, Capitol rioter Stephen Ayres, testified that he and others in the crowd took Trump’s pledge to join them at face value. Last week, Hutchinson testified that Trump tried to do so, confronting his security personnel as he left the Ellipse and trying to get them to take him to the Capitol.

There had been numerous warnings against a march, so much so that a typical Trump tweet encouraging people to make the trek somehow ended up being kiboshed. So much so that Kremer demanded secrecy about it, both because she knew her group had no permit for a march and because Trump would make the appeal only “unexpectedly.”

The plan was not spontaneous. And it was a plan that Trump’s attorneys reportedly feared would be seen as an incitement to riot.