January 6 Committee to Hear on Alleged Extremist Group Links to Trump

The congressional panel investigating the assault on Capitol Hill will hear testimony Tuesday linking far-right groups to the lawlessness that ensued when they tried to block the certification of Joe Bien’s victory in the November 2020 election.

The House committee has not yet said who will testify at the hearing, but one of them is expected to be Jason Van Tatenhove, a self-proclaimed “propagandist” for the Oath Keepers group, an anti-government militia.

Members of the Oath Keepers were among nearly 2,000 supporters of then-President Donald Trump who stormed the Capitol.

Other testimonies are expected to focus on the role played by the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group. Five of its leaders have been indicted for seditious conspiracy related to the assault and will stand trial before the end of the year.

The same charge has been brought against 11 Oath Keepers members, three of whom have already pleaded guilty.

The question facing the panel is to bring up whether there was a link between the extremist groups specifically with Trump, and in another context to detail contacts they had with his political advisers while he tried to retain power by questioning the official results of several states that showed Biden as the winner.

Also taking prominence will be a tweet Trump sent to millions of his supporters on December 19, 2020 that read: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election. Large protests in DC on January 6. Be there, that will be stormy”.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the committee member who will be in charge of most of Tuesday’s questioning, told the network CBSNews: “Donald Trump was, of course, the central figure who set everything in motion. He was the person (…) who identified January 6 as the date for the big protest and announced it in his tweet on December 19 after a crazy meeting (with political advisers), which has been described as the most rampant throughout the Trump presidency.”

Then, he added, “an hour or two later Donald Trump sent the tweet that would be heard around the world, the first time in US history that a president called for a protest against his own government to try to stop the vote count of the Electoral College in an election that he had lost… Nothing like that had ever happened before.”

“So people are going to hear the story of that tweet and the explosive effect it had on Trump’s world, and specifically on domestic violent extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country at the time,” Raskin said. .

Trump has ridiculed the committee’s investigation, calling its nine members — seven Democrats and two Republicans — “political thugs” and other epithets.

[Informe de Ken Bredemeier, VOA]

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