Jan. 6 takeaways: Trump’s ‘playbook’ to overturn election

WASHINGTON »

A House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection is turning to former President Donald

Trump’s pressure campaign on state and local officials to overturn his 2020 election loss.

In its fourth hearing this month, the panel is examining how Trump focused on a few swing states, directly urging officials to decertify President Joe Biden’s victory or find additional votes for himself. It was part of a larger scheme that also involved dozens of lawsuits, pressure on Department of Justice officials and, eventually, lobbying Vice President Mike Pence to reject Biden’s win at the congressional electoral count on Jan. 6.

“Pressuring public servants into betraying their oaths was a fundamental part of the playbook,” the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, said of Trump and his allies. “And a handful of election officials in several key states stood between Donald Trump and the upending of American democracy.”

‘THEY DID THEIR JOBS’ The panel is keeping to a tight narrative as it makes its case to the American public that Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat directly led to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, when hundreds of his supporters broke into the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Biden’s victory.

The witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing were all public officials who were directly lobbied by Trump or who received threats for doing their jobs after Trump persuaded millions of his followers — with no evidence — that he had actually won, not lost, the election.

Arizona’s Republican state House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who testified in person at the hearing, spoke about phone calls from Trump and his allies asking him to decertify Arizona’s legitimate electors and replace them. Bowers said he repeatedly asked Trump’s attorneys to show evidence of widespread fraud, but they never provided any.

There was no legal pathway to execute such a request, Bowers said he told them, adding that he wouldn’t do anything illegal for Trump. “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath,” Bowers said he responded.