The committee formed by the House of Representatives to investigate the January 6, 2021 assault on the United States Capitol on Thursday released its final report, an 845-page set of documents supporting the panel’s claim that the attack was caused directly by former President Donald Trump and represented the final act in a “multi-party conspiracy to overturn the legal results of the 2020 presidential election.”
The product of more than 17 months of investigation, the report is the summary of evidence gathered through thousands of witness interviews, documents and electronic communications obtained by subpoena. According to the committee, “That evidence has led to one overriding and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who was followed by many others. None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him.” “.
Trump himself has consistently denounced the committee and its work, continuing to falsely insist that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
expansive report
In addition to examining the attack itself, the report outlines Trump’s pressure on US officials, states, lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence to rig the system or break the law.
The publication of the report follows a final committee hearingheld Monday, in which members charged the former president with committing multiple crimes and referred him to the Justice Department for prosecution.
The charges include insurrection, obstruction of official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and conspiracy to make a false statement.
The recommendation carries no legal weight, but the voluminous records produced by the committee will supplement evidence gathered by the Justice Department in its own investigation and could influence the final decision on whether to prosecute the former president.
Main findings
The report issued Thursday builds a case that former President Trump was at the center of a conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, using multiple strategies, all of which ultimately failed.
It documents efforts to pressure state and local officials to contest or throw out election results that showed a Biden victory, even after dozens of lawsuits challenging the results were dismissed in court challenges.
After other attempts were thwarted, Trump latched on to a theory advanced by attorney John Eastman that Pence had the authority to refuse to count the votes of specific states when Congress met on January 6, a strategy intended to buy time to persuade state legislatures to take action to overturn the results at the state level.
Pence ultimately refused to accept the plan, and evidence uncovered by the committee indicates that even when he proposed it, Eastman was aware that the plan was illegal.
Effort to Corrupt the Department of Justice
The committee’s report also details what it describes as an effort by the former president to “corrupt the Department of Justice.”
After the elections, the former Secretary of Justice William Barr informed Trump that all the investigations into electoral irregularities undertaken by the Department of Justice had not found evidence of fraud large enough to overturn the results of the vote. In the face of continued claims of fraud by Trump, Barr announced his resignation in December 2020.
The report documents that, in the weeks that followed, Trump took a series of steps to try to persuade senior department officials to issue statements expressing doubt about the election results.
Trump found an ally in Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Clark, an official in the department’s Civil Division, who drafted a document for the department to send to election officials in Georgia, falsely claiming that the department had “significant concerns ” about possible fraud that could have affected the outcome of the elections there and in other states.
The document, which was never sent, also urged the state legislature to consider overturning the election result in that state.
The report chronicles a dramatic confrontation in the Oval Office, in which Trump proposed installing Clark as acting attorney general. The highest-ranking officials in the department told the president that if he took that step, they would resign immediately.
Trump knew the claims were false
A crucial finding in the report, highlighted in public hearings, was that Trump knew he had lost a fair election, having been told so unequivocally by several of his top advisers.
The point is important, because proving that the former president was not acting in good faith when he claimed the election had been stolen and sought state officials to produce alternative results is a key component of fraud charges.
Trump pushed back on that particular claim on his Truth Social network, writing: “This is a complete LIE. I never thought for a moment that the 2020 Presidential Election was not rigged and stolen, and my conviction grew even stronger with Over time”.
storming the capitol
The investigative committee, formally the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol, was originally conceived as a bipartisan effort with the support of the leaders of the Republican and Democratic House caucuses.
It was formed to gather facts and conclusions about the events of that day, when a crowd of thousands of Trump supporters attended a rally near the White House, in which Trump told them to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell.” The mob descended on the Capitol, where lawmakers had gathered to certify the victory of now President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
The crowd quickly turned violent, and despite the presence of more than 1,000 law enforcement officers, was able to force entry into the building and force members of Congress and Pence to flee. Members of the crowd were angry with the vice president for his refusal to illegally declare Trump the victor, with many chanting “hang Mike Pence.”
The report states that during the hour-long attack, President Trump was aware of what was happening and yet sent a tweet attacking Pence, further inflaming the crowd. Witnesses presented by the committee said Trump refused requests by aides and family members to ask the rioters to leave.
Trump was eventually persuaded to ask the crowd to disperse, which he did in a video speech that described the rioters as “very special.” Order was finally restored late in the day, with the help of National Guard troops, and Congress formally certified victory from Biden.
Born into controversy
In the immediate aftermath of the assault, condemnation of the attack was bipartisan, and a proposal to fully investigate its causes received strong support from leaders on both sides. However, in the weeks that followed the assault, Republican lawmakers, following Trump’s lead, tried to downplay the severity of the event.
When the committee was formed in the early summer of 2021, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy nominated five Republicans, including Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. Because Jordan, a close Trump ally, would likely be a target of the investigation, and because Banks had publicly stated his unwillingness to cooperate with an investigation, House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, rejected their appointments and requested that McCarthy name replacements. Instead, the Republican leader withdrew all five nominees and refused to offer any new ones.
Pelosi responded by appointing two Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who had continued to denounce the attack and Trump’s role in inciting it.
A starting summer 2022the committee held a series of nine public hearings in which it laid out a complete timeline of the assault itself and of the efforts to overturn the election that preceded it.
House Republican Report
A conflicting report issued by the five House Republicans who were originally nominated to serve on the Jan. 6 Committee was released Wednesday.
The report focused primarily on security lapses that led the Capitol Police and the Washington Metropolitan Police Department to be unprepared for violence on Capitol Hill.
The report places much of the blame for the results of the riots on Pelosi, alleging that she decided not to bring in additional security, including the National Guard, before the riots.
The Republican report does not address the root causes of the unrest, former President Trump’s actions on and before January 6, or the broader effort to overturn the election results.
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