Twitter moderators became concerned during the election, when Trump advised the right-wing militia Proud Boys to “stand by” during a debate. For the first time, the informant said, the president “was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives.”

The latest hearing of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the Capitol has identified another culprit in the sordid tale of President Trump's attempts to remain in power.

This one was not a person. Besides the sycophants that encouraged Trump's fantasies, the White House staff who tried to put the brakes on them, the right-wing militias who came to Washington armed, and the raging president himself, the social media platform Twitter has now come under scrutiny.

Airing audio testimony from a person whose voice was disguised like some Mafia informant, the committee established that Twitter staff sounded the alarm about the president's inflammatory tweets, to no avail.

The former employee (identified as male here out of convenience) testified he believed that the President's tweet of Dec. 19 crossed a line.

That early-morning missive was fired off after a raucous White House meeting that included outsiders who had wandered into the Oval Office, including the discredited attorney Sidney Powell and Trump's disgraced former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.

White House staff had pushed back against Powell, Flynn et al, declaring Trump had no avenue to remain president because all his legal appeals had been exhausted.

Rather than concede defeat, however, Trump stayed up late and took to Twitter. His post read, in part: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Twitter moderators became concerned during the election, when Trump advised the right-wing militia Proud Boys to “stand by” during a debate. For the first time, the informant said, the president “was speaking directly to extremist organizations and giving them directives.”

By Dec. 19, Trump's supporters took his tweet as a call to arms.

The responses included such phrases as “locked and loaded” and “ready for Civil War Part Two.”

This sparked “serious concerns” at Twitter, according to the committee, but no ban on the president.

This was because Twitter, as the former employee said, “relished having that sort of power within the social media ecosystem.”

He testified that “for months I had been begging” for action to be taken, but none was forthcoming.

The consequences, he believed, would be dire. “People were going to die,” he predicted, and of course he was right.

Twitter did eventually ban the president, two days after the deadly insurrection at the Capitol. Citing its policy against material that glorifies violence, the social media platform announced Jan. 8 he would be permanently exiled.

All of this, of course, was too little too late. One has to wonder how the Jan. 6 events might have unfolded if the president had been banned sooner.

Even before his Dec. 19 tweet inviting supporters to a “wild” rally at the Capitol, Trump had been using the platform to spread lies about election fraud.

Between the day after the election and his ban on Jan. 8, the former president tweeted more than 1,500 times, according to the nonpartisan organization Issue One. Of those tweets, 60 percent questioned the legitimacy of the election.

It is not difficult to draw a straight line between Trump's tweets and the violence of Jan. 6. The committee presented evidence that many invading the Capitol that day said they did so at Trump's direction.

Further, this barrage of inflammatory falsehoods continues to poison our democracy. Two polls last year found that two-thirds of Republicans still believed that Trump was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Ultimately, Donald Trump bears the most responsibility for the deadly insurrection and the damage it has done to our sacred institutions. But a host of apologists and weaklings enabled him to spread his lies and manipulate his supporters.

Now we add Twitter to the list. Its craven calculation – that the engagement of 88 million users was more important than our democracy – played a direct role in bringing the mob to the Capitol.