Jan. 6 committee releases final report on Capitol riot, blaming Trump and his allies

[ad_1]

Washington — The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol released its long-awaited final report late Thursday evening, wrapping up a nearly 18-month investigation that culminated in the landmark recommendation that the former President Donald Trump be criminally prosecuted for his conduct surrounding the insurgency.

The panel wrote that evidence presented during its hearings on “a multi-part plan” to annul the 2020 election “lead to one overriding and straightforward conclusion: the central cause of Jan. 6 was a man, the former President Donald Trump, whom many others have followed.”

“None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him,” the committee concluded.

The 814-page report devotes nearly 400 pages to a narrative that squarely blames Trump for the Capitol riot, beginning with a chapter titled “The Big Lie.” Here, the committee sets out to show that Trump was planning even before the 2020 presidential election to prematurely declare he had won. He cites his campaign team’s testimony in which they informed Trump that he lost the election and that there was no fraud.

The narrative reviews Trump’s alleged post-election efforts to retain power, including attempts to replace voter rolls with bogus surrogate voters who would support him, alleged efforts to overthrow the Justice Department by replacing officials who refused to make false claims that would help Trump stay in power and plan to stop Congressional certification of the election on Jan. 6.

The report also lists 11 recommendations to prevent another January 6. Among them: barring Trump from holding any future federal or state office and passing the Voter Count Act to clarify the narrow roles of the vice president and Congress in the presidential election and to make it more difficult to undo the results.

The committee points out that the Constitution states that individuals can be disqualified from holding public office if they “engage in an insurrection” or provide “aid or comfort” to it.

On Wednesday, the committee also began releasing transcripts of months of testimony it collected, beginning with interviews with 34 witnesses. Those witnesses included Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, and Arizona Republican Party chairwoman Kelli Ward. In addition to recommending charges against Trump, the committee also recommended charges against Eastman, a law professor who proposed that Vice President Mike Pence refuse to count ballots from certain states that had voted for Joe Biden.

Transcripts confirmed that many witnesses invoked their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination, including questions about biographical details. Stone, for example, asserted his Fifth Amendment rights when asked where he resides and his age.

Lawyers for Clark, a former Justice Department official who the committee says “stands out as a participant” in an alleged conspiracy to defraud the United States, responded to the report with a statement late Thursday attacking the committee. They called it a ‘political and public relations bust’ and said: ‘That’s why in coming out the Committee is desperately trying to cause a stir with criminal dismissals, it was obvious from the start that its members were going to for the purpose of trying to destroy their conservative political opponents.”

On Thursday, the panel released two transcripts of September interviews with Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchison testified before the committee in an explosive public hearing in late June, during which she discussed Trump’s repeated requests to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6 and an interaction she learned about between the former president and the head of his security service during a presidential election. vehicle after his speech on the Ellipse, which implied that Trump allegedly rushed to him when told he couldn’t go to the Capitol.

Later Thursday, the committee released transcripts of interviews with former Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency Director Chris Krebs; Capitol Rioter Stephen Ayres (Part 1, Part 2); former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, former Justice Department official Ken Klukowski (June 10, 2022), who was an aide to another Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark; and former Special Assistant to the President Sarah Matthew.

The committee released introductory documents to the report earlier this week, which included the committee’s criminal referrals to the Justice Department for possible prosecution and 17 key findings from its investigation.

The panel recommended that the Justice Department pursue at least four criminal charges against former President Donald Trump related to his alleged efforts to thwart the transfer of presidential power: obstruction of official process, conspiracy to defraud the United States- United, conspiracy to make a false statement and incitement, rebellion or insurrection.

What the January 6 committee’s criminal referrals mean for Trump 02:04

During its investigation, the select committee held 10 public hearings, interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and collected more than one million pages of documents. He issued subpoenas to Trump and some of his closest allies, but ultimately did not speak with former president or former vice president Mike Pence.

Committee hearings, most of which were held over the summer, focused on what investigators called a multi-part plan by Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the presidential election. of 2020 and keep the former president in office. The pressure campaign involved Pence, state lawmakers, election officials and the Justice Department, and culminated in the Jan. 6 attack, in which a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol. to try to prevent Congress from reaffirming President Biden’s election victory, the panel alleged.

Rep. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat and committee member, told “CBS Mornings” on Wednesday that the decision to remove Trump on possible criminal charges was a “dark decision to make, not a decision we made at the slight”.

“We believe that with respect to incitement to insurrection and conspiracy to defraud and obstruction of due process, conspiracy to lie … that Donald Trump committed all of these offences,” he said. Schiff said. “And since Congress itself fell victim to some of them, our democracy, all of them, that we had an obligation to report what we knew to the Department of Justice.”

Trump, who is launching a 2024 presidential bid, claimed he did nothing wrong on Jan. 6 and repeatedly called the committee’s investigation a “witch hunt.” He called the criminal dismissals “false charges brought by the highly partisan January 6 screening committee” in response to the release of the introductory materials earlier this week.

Assault on the United States Capitol More More

[ad_2]