Jan. 6 report blames Trump, aims to prevent return to power
WASHINGTON — A massive final report released by the House Jan. 6 committee late Thursday places the blame for the 2021 Capitol insurrection on one person: former President Donald Trump.
The dense, 814-page document details the findings of the panel’s 18month investigation, drawing on more than 1,000 witness interviews and more than a million pages of source material. The committee found a “multi-part conspiracy” orchestrated by Trump and his closest allies, all with the aim of overturning his 2020 election defeat.
By laying out the extraordinary details — his pressure on states, federal officials and Vice President Mike Pence — the committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans says it is trying to prevent anything similar from ever happening again.
The panel is also aiming to prevent Trump, who is running again for the presidency, from ever returning to power. Among other recommendations, the panel suggests that Congress consider barring him and others who helped him from federal office for his role in the insurrection, in which a violent mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
“Our country has come too far to allow a defeated President to turn himself 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 the committee’s chairman, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, in a foreword to the report.
A look at the findings and what’s next:
‘ONE MAN’ TO BLAME
The report traces Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud to conversations with some of his allies ahead of Election Day, evidence that his plan was “premeditated,” the committee says. After he carried out that plan by questioning the legitimate results on election night — “Frankly, we did win this election,” he told the TV cameras — he purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud.
Many of Trump’s White House advisers told him the lies were not true, according to multiple committee interviews, and his campaign lost a series of lawsuits challenging the results. But the former president did not waver.
“Donald Trump was no passive consumer of these lies,” the committee wrote. “He actively propagated them.”
The false claims “provoked his supporters to violence on January 6th,” the committee wrote. Trump summoned them to Washington and instructed them in a fiery speech to march to the Capitol even though some “were angry and some were armed.”
And after the violence started, Trump waited hours to tell them to stop. That was a “dereliction of duty,” the committee said.
PRESSURE ON THE STATES
As he lost in the courts, Trump “zeroed in” on key battleground states Biden had won and leaned on GOP state officials to overrule the will of their voters. The plan was wide-ranging, the committee shows, from pressuring state legislatures and election officials to creating false slates of electors. The panel obtained emails and documents showing talks within the White House and with outside ad
visers about how such a scheme could work.
Perhaps the most stunning attempt to pressure a state official was Trumps’ remarkable Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked him to “find” votes. Raffensperger did not comply.
After speaking with election officials from several states, the committee said that Georgia call was “one element of a larger and more comprehensive effort — much of it unseen by and unknown to the general public — to overturn the votes cast by millions of American citizens across several states.”
The panel assessed that Trump and his inner circle engaged in “in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach” to state officials between the election and the insurrection. At the same time, the president was trying to get Justice Department officials to go along with his plan.
“Had enough state officials gone along with President Trump’s plot, his attempt to stay in power might have worked,” the committee wrote. “It is fortunate that a critical mass of honorable officials withstood President Trump’s pressure to participate in this scheme.”
PENCE’S LIFE AT RISK
As Trump aggressively pushed Mike Pence to illegally object to the congressional certification of Biden’s victory as he presided over the joint session of Congress, the vice president’s life was increasingly in danger, the committee found.
At 8:17 a.m. on Jan. 6, Trump tweeted, “Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!”
By the start of the joint session at 1 p.m., Pence had announced that he would not. By then, there were hundreds of Trump’s supporters outside the Capitol, some chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Pence eventually fled the Senate chamber and narrowly escaped the rioters.
According to Secret Service documents provided to the panel, agents were aware of growing threats against Pence. In one instance, an agent in the intelligence division “was alerted to online chatter ‘regarding the VP being a dead man walking if he doesn’t do the right thing,’” the report says.
“It was an unprecedented scene in American history,” the committee wrote. “The President of the United States had riled up a mob that hunted his own Vice President.”
A THWARTED TRIP TO THE CAPITOL
Trump was determined to go to the Capitol with his supporters, the investigation found, but nearly everyone thought that was a bad idea — most of all his security detail.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, testified over the summer about a conversation she had with former Trump security official Tony Ornato, where he recalled Trump lashing out at his security after his speech and even grabbing the wheel of the presidential SUV.
In the report, the committee writes that Ornato denied Hutchinson’s story in a deposition last month, saying he was not aware of a genuine push by Trump to join his supporters at the Capitol.