The US House of Representatives commission investigating the attack on the Capitol completed 18 months of work Monday, conducting more than a thousand interviews, reviewing a million documents and summoning around 100 witnesses. To these figures we must add new ones: At the end of the last session, ahead of its foreseeable dissolution with the arrival of the new Congress in early 2023, its nine members published by a conservative majority a 154-page summary of their investigation (the full report will arrive on Wednesday ), in which the nine members set out 17 conclusions they believe have been proven that have prompted them to seek the Justice Department to prosecute Donald Trump for four crimes: inciting insurrection, obstructing an official process of Congress, conspiracy to propagate election fraud and attempted fraud of the United States.
Page 7 of the summary reads: “The ultimate cause of January 6th was a single man, former President Trump, followed by many others. Nothing that happened that day would have happened if it weren’t for him.”
The document provides an overview of the evidence they shared with the public at the 10 televised hearings they organized between June and October. There’s no great news, although there are some juicy details, like an inventory of the guns seized at the Trump-convened rally near the White House that day. “Among the 28,000 spectators who passed through the security arches, the Secret Service captured real loot: 242 canisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 stun guns, six bulletproof vests, three gas masks, 30 batons or baton instruments and 17 miscellaneous items such as scissors, needles or screwdrivers. Thousands of people deliberately stayed away from these safety arcs. Many others carried firearms. On that list were rifles, AR-15s, and Glock revolvers.
These are the 17 points that summarize the conclusions of the investigation.
1. The commission accuses the former president of “deliberately disseminating false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 election in order to annul that election” while soliciting money from his supporters. He also links these efforts to “the January 6 violence,” which ended in an attack that left five dead and hundreds injured.
2. Likewise, the Republican leader, knowing that “he and his allies had lost dozens of electoral demands,” still refused to accept defeat. “Instead of fulfilling his constitutional obligation to ‘see that the laws are properly enforced,’ President Trump conspired to annul the election results,” the committee document reads.
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Pages of the final document of the commission investigating the attack on the Capitol. Jon Elswick (AP)
3. The commission also believes Trump pressured his Vice President Mike Pence to do something beyond his power: refuse to certify the Jan. 6 congressional recount. During the riot, Trump supporters from all over the United States marched to the Capitol and chanted “Let’s hang Mike Pence,” while the president still watched everything on TV without lifting a finger, even though he knew it was the only one , who was able to stop this violence.
Four. He “attempted to corrupt the United States Department of Justice” by attempting to pressure its officials into “willfully making false statements to assist it in its efforts to overturn the election result”. Not only that, Trump then “offered Jeff Clark the position of Assistant Attorney General, knowing full well that Clark intended to disseminate fraudulent information.”
5. According to research released Monday, Trump pressured state lawmakers and officials to rig the legitimate outcome of the November 2020 election. These attempts were particularly aggressive in Georgia, where an Atlanta court-appointed grand jury is investigating the tycoon’s wrongful intentions. who even called the Secretary of State by phone to ask him to request “11,780 votes,” one more than those that separated him from Biden.
6. Trump also “oversaw an effort to obtain and transmit false election certificates to Congress and the National Archives” in Washington.
7. And he lobbied several members of the Republican Party in Congress to help him in his crusade not to confirm electoral votes.
8th. The investigation concludes that the former president made false statements in a letter to a federal court.
9. Building on these bogus vote-stealing theories, he called thousands of his supporters to a January 6 rally in Washington. He knew many of them were armed “and angry,” yet he encouraged them to march up Capitol Hill to “take back their country.” This Monday, the day the committee called for Trump’s impeachment, also marked the two-year anniversary of one of his most famous tweets (and the competition is really tough there): “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Don’t miss it. It’s going to be wild,” he wrote at the time.
10 When the attack began, he repeatedly refused to send a message to the insurgents to end the violence. “Instead, he watched the violent attack on television,” the report said. More specifically, 187 minutes, which hundreds of lawmakers spent hiding in the Capitol, elapsed before Trump recorded and broadcast a video urging his people to go home.
12. He also believes it has been proven that all of these actions were part of a “conspiracy by various parts” to remain in power.
13. The committee understands that before Jan. 6, the intelligence agencies knew something was brewing and shared the information they had with the executive branch, the intelligence community and the National Security Council.
14 This information was clear on one thing: there were no plans by far-left groups like Antifa to engage in a violent counter-protest, which had always been peaceful, on the day Biden’s election victory was confirmed.
fifteen. The summary, which spans half a hundred pages of notes, also takes into account what US intelligence and law enforcement didn’t know: the scope of “ongoing planning by President Trump, John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and their associates” to annul confirmed elections Results.” They also “didn’t anticipate the mockery that President Trump would offer in his speech that day in the crowd.”
16 The committee underscored the “courage” shown by members of the capital’s Capitol Police and Metropolitan Police. Neither saw the resulting violence coming.”
17 Finally, the nine members of the commission believe that “Trump had the authority and responsibility to direct the deployment of the National Guard to the District of Columbia, but he never gave the order to deploy the National Guard on January 6 or any other day “. . “He also didn’t direct any federal agency to help. Because the authority to deploy the National Guard had been delegated to the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense could, and ultimately did, deploy the Guard. “The committee found no evidence that the defense intentionally delayed deployment of the National Guard, although it acknowledges that there were some in the department with serious concerns who advised caution that there was an illegal order for the military to deploy to the military.” Support could enact efforts to cancel the elections.
The bipartisan commission’s text also supports the regulatory change envisaged in the Presidential Election Reform Act. It is a project presented by two members of the committee: Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney and California Democrat Zoe Lofgren. It seeks to make it more difficult to cancel a presidential election by amending the Electoral Count Act of 1887. It also limits the Vice President’s role to mere testimony during the trial. After the process passed the House of Representatives in September, it is expected to be voted on in the Senate this Wednesday as part of an omnibus spending bill.
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