The House January 6 select committee advanced new evidence at its Thursday primetime hearing that Donald Trump took active steps to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, paving the way for prosecutors to construct a criminal case against the former president.

The former president knew as early as 15 mins after returning to the White House from his rally at the Ellipse that the US Capitol was under attack by his supporters, and yet acted only to find ways to stop the certification by calling senators to make objections, the panel showed.

And when Trump finally sent a tweet instructing the rioters to leave the Capitol, it was 4.17pm, only after it had become clear they had been unable to fully occupy the building after being repulsed by a late-arriving national guard and the Capitol attack had largely failed.

Those deliberate actions to first advance the obstruction, and then refuse to intervene until the attack was essentially over, bolstered the case that Trump violated federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding, through both action and inaction.

Elaine Luria, the select committee member who co-led Thursday’s hearing, concluded: “In the end, this is not a story of inaction in time of crisis. It was the final action of Donald Trump’s own plan to usurp the will of the American people and remain in power.”

The select committee, in effect, at the primetime hearing laid out the evidence of obstruction of an official proceeding – a violation of federal law – in such a manner that justice department prosecutors could take up their presentation as a framework for a potential prosecution.

Aside from presenting new details of the former president’s actions on January 6, the panel also revealed new and potentially legally significant details about Trump’s frame of mind that the members believe revealed his intent and understanding of what had taken place that day.

The select committee notably focused on a tweet that Trump sent at 6.01pm, after the attack was largely over, referring to his lie that he had won the 2020 election, that read: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away.”

Playing a clip from a deposition with Trump’s close aide Nicholas Luna, the select committee revealed that Luna had suggested that Trump might consider revising that first part of the tweet because it read to him as though Trump was responsible for the Capitol attack.

Luna testified that he had told Trump the language “would lead some to believe that potentially he had something to do with the events that happened at the Capitol”.

Trump did not revise the tweet, and the select committee appeared to raise the extraordinary situation that the former president did not dispute that assessment that he had something to do with the Capitol attack and therefore saw no reason to change the phrasing.

The episode is significant since it came immediately after the crisis at the Capitol, which Trump had been watching live on television, as had millions of shocked Americans. Insight into Trump’s frame of mind would be an important consideration for any criminal case.Within three days, Trump’s stance had shifted from apparently not caring that he might be perceived as having a role in the events of January 6, to refusing to even discuss in a video address from the White House the attack or the US Capitol police officers who died.

The reversal was noted by Trump’s former campaign chairman, Tim Murtaugh, in a text to a Trump campaign press aide, Matthew Wolking, that the select committee showed.

“He’d be implicitly faulting the mob. And he won’t do that, because they’re his people. And he would be close to acknowledging that what he lit at the rally got out of control. No way he acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault,” Murtaugh said.

From an investigative perspective, the select committee also raised the pattern of crucial missing evidence from January 6, which members and investigators on the panel increasingly see as malfeasance, according to two sources close to the inquiry.

The primetime hearing on Thursday – the final one of the summer before further hearings in September – for the large part ran through how Trump chose not to act while ensconced in the White House watching Fox News as the violence at the Capitol unfolded two miles away down Pennsylvania Avenue.

In order to reconstruct his actions, the select committee showed it had attempted to rely on the presidential daily diary, the presidential call logs and official photos taken by the White House photographer that day.

But the panel revealed that none of those records existed for the crucial 187 minutes of the Capitol attack. The daily diary lacked entries, hours’ worth of call logs were missing and the White House photographer had been told to take no pictures during that time.

The missing records fit a pattern of evidence loss, the select committee indicated: the text messages among Secret Service agents on the presidential security detail that day were erased 11 days after Congress requested the communications in January last year.