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The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol voted Monday to send to Justice Department prosecutors a recommendation that the former president be charged with four crimes: inciting or assisting an insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to make a false statement.
The move has no legal weight, but marks the first time Congress has made such a referral for a former president.
Rep. Jamie B. Raskin, D-Maryland, said, “The committee believes that more than sufficient evidence exists for a criminal referral of former president Trump for assisting or aiding and comforting those at the Capitol who engaged in a violent attack on the United States.”
Before the announcement, the committee played a video highlighting key findings from its 18-month investigation, including Republicans dismissing election fraud claims, rioters threatening violence against Vice President Mike Pence and White House aides saying the president did not call security officials to protect the Capitol.
Members of the committee then shared recaps of testimony.
Rep. Elaine Luria, D-Virginia, said that Trump never ordered troops to respond to his supporters because they were carrying out his wishes. “He actively disregarded his constitutional obligation to take care that the laws are faithfully executed as we’ve established through months of investigation,” she said. “That is because the mob wanted what President Trump wanted: to impede the peaceful transition of power.”
Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Florida, recalled that, on Dec. 19, 2020, Trump posted a tweet urging his supporters to travel to Washington for a protest on Jan. 6, 2021. That tweet, Murphy said, “galvanized domestic violent extremists.” Among the warnings law enforcement agencies received was one that stated: “Their plan is to literally kill people. Please, please take this tip seriously.”
Rep. Pete Aguilar, D-California, described former president Donald Trump’s pressure on his vice president, Mike Pence.
Aguilar noted that Trump relied on the flawed and discredited legal theory advanced by one of his attorneys, John Eastman.
“President Trump accepted and repeated Eastman’s theory and used it to pressure the vice president to take unlawful action in multiple heated conversations,” Aguilar said during his opening statement. “President Trump directly pressured Vice President Pence to adopt the Eastman theory and either reject the electors or send them back to the state legislatures.”
Pence and his staff repeatedly told Trump that the vice president did not have that authority. Trump, in response, grew angry and doubled down on his pressure campaign, Aguilar said.
The congressman also said that during the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, “President Trump deliberately chose to issue a tweet attacking Mr. Pence knowing that the crowd had already grown violent.”
Pence was forced to “flee to a secure location” Aguilar noted, “where he actively coordinated with law enforcement and other government officials to address the ongoing violence.”
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California, said that Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election being stolen were not spontaneous but rather a purposeful attempt to increase distrust in the electoral process that started long before the insurrection.”Based on this assembled evidence, the select committee has reached a series of specific findings, and many of these findings pertain to what has been called the ‘big lie,’ the enormous effort led by ex-president Trump to spread baseless accusations and misinformation in an attempt to falsely convince tens of millions of Americans that the election had been stolen from him,” she said.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Illinois, whose stint in Congress will end Jan. 3, used his opening remarks to focus on President Donald Trump’s efforts to convince his attorney general, William P. Barr, to help him overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump, Kinzinger said, sought to corrupt the Justice Department’s independence from the White House by attempting to get Barr and other Justice Department officials to “investigate and prosecute purported election fraud and to help him convince the public that the election was stolen.”
Barr refused to do Trump’s bidding, Kinzinger said.
The Jan. 6 committee found that Barr advised Trump that the Justice Department “had not seen any evidence to support Trump’s theory that the election was stolen by fraud,” Kinzinger said.
“Attorney General Barr assured President Trump that the Justice Department was properly investigating claims of election fraud,” Kinzinger said. “He debunked numerous election fraud claims, many of which the president would then go on to repeat publicly.”
Barr, Kinzinger added, made clear that Trump was doing “a great disservice to the country by pursuing” these false claims.
Trump also sought help from Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general. The president wanted the two to “just say the election was corrupt” and to “leave the rest” to him and Republican lawmakers.
In other words, Kinzinger said, Trump’s plan for Rosen and Donoghue was to get them to “tell a small lie to put the facade of legitimacy” on his false claims.
In addition to the referrals to the Justice Department, the House Jan. 6 committee is likely to make ethics referrals for lawmakers who ignored the panel’s subpoenas.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, and fellow Republican Reps. Scott Perry (Pennsylvania), Jim Jordan (Ohio), Andy Biggs (Arizona) and Mo Brooks (Alabama) ignored subpoenas from the Jan. 6 committee.
“We’ll be considering what’s the appropriate remedy for members of Congress who ignore a congressional subpoena, as well as the evidence that was so pertinent to our investigation and why we wanted to bring them in,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-California, a panel member, said during an interview Sunday on CNN. “We have weighed what is the remedy for members of Congress. Is it a criminal referral to another branch of government? Or is it better that the Congress police its own?”
Schiff said the panel had considered both censure and ethics referrals for the lawmakers.
Even before the Jan. 6 committee convened Monday, a spokesman for former president Donald Trump sought to discredit its work.
“The January 6th un-Select Committee held show trials by Never Trump partisans who are a stain on this country’s history,” Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement. “This Kangaroo court has been nothing more than a Hollywood executive’s vanity documentary project that insults Americans’ intelligence and makes a mockery of our democracy.”
James Goldston, a former president of ABC News, has helped the committee produce videos that have been shown at its hearings.
The committee has been examining the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop Congress from counting the 2020 electoral college results. Five people died on that day or in the immediate aftermath, and 140 police officers were assaulted.
Committee members have agreed to make all evidence and transcripts of depositions publicly available, though they are likely to be released days after the report.
Nearly two-thirds of registered voters (64 percent) say they’re at least somewhat likely to read the report produced by the Jan. 6 committee, a Quinnipiac University poll released last week found.
More than one-third of voters (35 percent) say they’re “very likely” to read the report while another 29 percent say they’re “somewhat likely” to read it.
Another 11 percent say they’re “not so likely” to read it while 23 percent put the chances at “not at all.” (Another 2 percent didn’t know.)
The poll also found that voters are evenly split on the way the committee is handling its investigation, with 45 percent approving and 45 percent disapproving.
Meanwhile, 64 percent say they think former president Donald Trump bears a lot or some of the responsibility for the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, while 33 percent say he bears not much or none of the responsibility.
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Rep. Jim Banks, erstwhile purveyor of extreme right-win nonsense, scoffed at the Select Committee’s investigation for its failure to examine why security around the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was not better informed or prepared. He thinks that should have been the focus of the committee.
So now he reports the incoming Republican-controlled House of Representatives will launch its own investigation of January 6 with its only focus on the security issue, apparently not realizing that if then-President Donald Trump had not incited citizens to go to Washington, march to the Capitol, and “fight like hell” to steal the election a high level of security would not have been necessary.
True to his name, he is banking on the ignorance of his constituents, the GOP base, and the propogandists in the far-right media to not comprehend what triggered the need security in the first place. Thankfully the Select Committee rightly put the focus of its investigation on the most important questions of that day and have provided the rest of us the answers.
Another nothingburger to appeal to BlueAnon. “We’ve got him this time!” the AP asserts one day, then the WaPo provides updates the next day…even as we’ve learned that “democracy dies in darkness” is leaving more of its office space shrouded in the darkness of disuse (teleworking notwithstanding), as Pravda on the Potomac announces loses of 500K subscribers since Biden was installed and more layoffs. Bezos is indicating his growing fatigue for the sharpened ideological push of the neo-liberalism he previously embraced, so it’s not too likely he’ll keep bailing out his paper tiger. Save Pi and let the feline swim.
It’s increasingly obvious that Jan 6 was a Reichstag Fire. But it’s the one day where the left cares that police officers were assaulted.
Lauren, you minimize the historic significance of the “Reichstag Fire” on February 27, 1933 in Berlin. When a sizeable portion of Germany’s parliamentary building went up in flames from an arson attack that day, Adolf Hitler played upon public and political fears to consolidate power. That event set the stage for the rise of Nazi Germany. Trump didn’t set a fire to our Capitol on January 6, 2021, but he most certainly enflamed the crazed passions of his followers to storm it with the singular goal of preventing Biden (the legitimate winner of both the popular vote and the electoral college vote) from taking office. You need to quit being an apologist for Trump, the MAGA cult, and right-wing extremism, and recognize the significance of January 6th.
I have no problem with the committee investigating Trumps role in the
Jan. 6th rioting. No problem at all.
But I also have the following questions that need to be investigated. Such as —
-Why security was not beefed up needs to be investigated.
You can’t tell me that the FBI didn’t have several informants in each of the
groups that attacked the police and rioted. They did!!
Second, why reinforcements from surrounding agencies were not brought in earlier also needs to be investigated.
I realize that this whole episode is a lesson learned. But there also needs
to be additional accountability.