Jan. 6 committee issues final report

The Jan. 6 House select committee released its long-awaited final report Thursday, capping an 18-month probe of the 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump.

The damning 845-page report was issued three days after the bipartisan committee voted unanimously to refer Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation and possible prosecution over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.

Among the many recommendations is that congressional committees with such authority consider making a “formal mechanism for evaluating whether to bar” Trump from holding future federal office attributable to evidence that he violated his constitutional oath to support the U.S. Structure while engaging in an revolt.

The report comes weeks after Trump announced that he’ll seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024.

“Our country has come too far to permit a defeated President to show himself right into a successful tyrant by upending our democratic institutions, fomenting violence, and, as I saw it, opening the door to those in our country whose hatred and bigotry threaten equality and justice for all Americans,” wrote committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., in a foreword to the report.

The committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, wrote in her own foreword, “Every President in our history has defended this orderly transfer of authority, except one.”

“January 6, 2021 was the primary time one American President refused his Constitutional duty to transfer power peacefully to the subsequent,” Cheney wrote.

The primary of the report’s eight chapters titled “The Big Lie,” a reference to Trump’s repeated false claims that he had won the election.

That chapter notes that Trump made efforts even before Election Day to “delegitimize the election process” by suggesting it might be marred by ballot fraud, particularly in reference to mail-in voting whose use was expanded attributable to the Covid-19 pandemic.

The second chapter, titled “I Just Need to Find 11,780 Votes,” details Trump’s try to subvert the Electoral College, the body that really chooses the winner of presidential elections on the idea of candidates’ popular vote victories in individual states, and portions of two states.

The title refers to what Trump said to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call, during which the president pressured Raffensperger to take steps that might invalidate Biden’s popular victory in that state.

That chapter also details the widespread campaign by Trump and his allies to get Republican-controlled legislatures in states that Biden had won to not certify the election results, or to interchange slates of Electoral College electors.

“The Select Committee estimates that within the two months between the November election and the January sixth revolt, President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at the least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election results,” the report says.

“This included at the least: 68 meetings, attempted or connected phone calls, or text messages, each aimed toward a number of State or local officials; 18 instances of distinguished public remarks, with language targeting a number of such officials; and 125 social media posts by President Trump or senior aides targeting a number of such officials, either explicitly or implicitly, and mostly from his own account,” the report says.

The following chapters outline how Trump and his allies aimed to get alternate slates of electors for him presented to Congress over the actual slates that Biden won, their efforts to get the Department of Justice to solid doubt on the integrity of the election, and to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify several states’ Electoral College slates.

The plan to pressure Pence was designed to throw the choice on who would win the election into the House of Representatives. Despite Democrats holding a majority of the seats in that chamber on the time, Republicans could have delivered the victory to Trump because they held the vast majority of state delegations, which each get a single vote under the system.

The last three chapters concentrate on the lead-up to the Capitol riot, Trump’s “dereliction” of duty by refusing to call off the mob, and an evaluation of the attack on the Capitol.

Cheney, in her foreword to the report, noted, “What a lot of the public didn’t know before our investigation is that this: Donald Trump’s own campaign officials told him early on that his claims of fraud were false.”

“Donald Trump’s senior Justice Department officials — each appointed by Donald Trump himself —investigated the allegations and told him repeatedly that his fraud claims were false,” Cheney wrote.

“Donald Trump’s White House lawyers also told him his fraud claims were false. From the start, Donald Trump’s fraud allegations were concocted nonsense, designed to prey upon the patriotism of hundreds of thousands of men and girls who love our country.”

In its recommendations, the Jan. 6 committee urged the Senate to pass the Electoral Count Act, which the House already has passed. The act would reaffirm that a vice chairman has no authority or discretion to reject an official slate of presidential electors submitted by the governors of their states.

The panel also said courts and bar disciplinary bodies that regulate conduct by lawyers “should proceed to guage the conduct of attorneys described on this Report.”

“Attorneys shouldn’t have the discretion to make use of their law licenses to undermine the constitutional and statutory process for peace-fully transferring power in our government,” the report says.

In a suggestion titled “Violent Extremism,” the report says, ‘Federal Agencies with intelligence and security missions, including the Secret Service, should … move forward on whole-of-government strate-
gies to combat the specter of violent activity posed by all extremist groups, including white nationalist groups and violent anti-government groups while respecting the civil rights and First Amendment civil liberties of all residents.”

The Jan. 6 panel has already begun sharing its evidence with the DOJ, which last month appointed a special counsel to research whether Trump or others unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power to Biden.

Without Trump’s encouragement, the Jan. 6 riot, “would have never occurred,” the panel’s chair Thompson, said in an interview earlier Thursday with MSNBC. “It could have been the conventional transfer of power that we do every 4 years when there may be a presidential election.”

“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but certainly not do you tear town hall up or the courthouse up, and, God forbid, america Capitol,” Thompson said. “It was just something that I feel for many Americans it was beyond imagination … And there are still lots of individuals who cannot fathom why our people would do this.”

Each the DOJ and House probe are focused, amongst other things, on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a whole bunch of Trump’s backers stormed the U.S. Capitol and compelled lawmakers and Pence to flee the chambers of Congress.

The invasion disrupted a joint session of Congress that was being held to substantiate Biden’s victory within the Electoral College.

Pence, who was presiding over that session, resisted pressure by Trump and others to refuse to simply accept the Electoral College slates of several swing states that had given Biden his margin of victory.

The House committee conducted greater than 1,000 witness interviews, which incorporates ones with Trump’s White House aides and lawyers, several of his adult children, and his close allies. The panel also compiled a whole bunch of hundreds of documents as a part of its investigation.

Trump spread false claims of election fraud before and after the 2020 election and pursued quite a few attempts to reverse his loss to Biden within the weeks after Election Day. His public campaign to achieve this culminated with a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, where he urged the group to march with him to the Capitol to press Congress to undo the election results.

Trump never marched to the Capitol that, but as an alternative spent hours within the White House as his supporters attacked cops inside and out of doors the Capitol, and swarmed through the halls of Congress. Trump didn’t publicly urged the mob to go away the Capitol until late within the afternoon that day, despite calls by senior officials within the White House that he achieve this.

“You are the commander in chief. You have an assault happening on the Capitol of america of America, and there is nothing?” Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to the House committee.

“No call? Nothing? Zero?” Milley added.

In its vote Monday, the committee referred Trump to the DOJ for potential prosecution for 4 crimes, including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and inciting an revolt.

Individually, a state grand jury in Georgia is collecting evidence for a criminal probe of Trump by the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office for his try to get Georgia election officials to undo Biden’s election victory in that state.

Trump is also under criminal investigation by the DOJ for the removal of presidency documents, a few of them highly classified, from the White House when he left office.