The most high-profile congressional investigation since Watergate concluded Thursday that former US President Donald Trump deliberately spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election and incited a mob of his supporters. to attack the US Capitol.
The long-awaited 8-chapter, 845-page report by the congressional investigative committee into the January 6, 2021 attack on Capitol Hill provides a road map for possible criminal charges against Trump and others.
Written in narrative form, the document breaks down the story, which the commission laid out in its televised hearings earlier this year.
The commission voted Monday to refer its findings to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Among them are four possible federal charges against Trump. The former president is accused of providing aid and encouragement to persons who participated in a rebellion.
The Justice Department is conducting its own investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill that left five dead.
“As you read this report, please consider this: Vice President Mike Pence, along with many of the appointees surrounding Donald Trump, worked to prevent many of the worst parts of Trump’s plan to overturn the election. “, writes the vice president of the Commission, Republican Liz Cheney, in the foreword of the report, according to the Athens News Agency.
“This was not a given. It is comforting to assume that the institutions of our Republic will always stand up to those who seek to subvert our Constitution from within. But our institutions are only strong when those who hold office are faithful to the Constitution,” he adds.
The report begins with the weeks leading up to the election and the evidence the committee gathered that Trump intended to declare victory on election night regardless of what the results showed.
It documents that the Donald Trump and his allies tried to overturn the election result, citing detailed court cases, appeals to state lawmakers to throw out vote counts and a campaign to pressure Justice Department officials to step in and declare, without evidence, that the election was stolen.
Like the committee’s series of hearings, the report concludes that for 187 minutes, Trump sat in a White House dining room on January 6, 2021, watching as a mob smashed windows and vandalized the Capitol, ignoring his family, staff and other Republicans, all of whom urged him to intervene.
“Our country has come too far to allow a defeated president to become a successful tyrant, subverting our democratic institutions, inciting violence and, as I have seen, opening the door to those in our country whose hatred and intolerance threaten equality and justice for all Americans,” said the committee’s chairman, Democrat Benny Thompson, in the foreword to the report.
The 18-month investigation gathered more than 1,000 depositions, including many from Trump’s top advisers, administration officials and family members.
Thompson said Monday that most of the non-sensitive material gathered by the committee would be made public before the end of the year. He did not specify how many documents would be made public or what would be classified as sensitive.
The report, which likely marks the final act of the cross-party committee, includes a list of 11 recommendationswhich include changes to the oversight of the Capitol Police, new protections for election workers, and the official designation of riots as riots to bar them from running for office in the future under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
The document also includes four references to issues including the funding behind Trump’s Jan. 6 protest march and the intelligence failures that allowed the attack to happen.
The Republicans, who will take control of the House of Representatives on Jan. 3, have said they do not plan to continue the work of the committee investigating the Capitol attack. In fact, the current Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is the favorite to take over the chairmanship of the chamber next year, said that the Republicans may conduct an investigation into the work of the fact-finding committee itself. January 6, 2021.
That statement sent the Capitol Hill attack investigation into a race to release its report and potentially millions of pages of related evidence in less than two weeks.
Source: News Beast
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