Capitol Riot Panel: Trump accuses January 6 of ‘attempted coup’

A House panel investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol strongly condemned Donald Trump on Thursday night, saying the attack was not spontaneous, but the “coup attempt” and failure of the failed presidential election were. a direct result of 2020.

With a 12-minute video of the deadly violence seen so far and impressive testimonies from Trump’s inner circle, the 6/1 committee provided compelling details to prove Trump’s repeated lies about election fraud and his public intent to prevent Joe from winning. Biden. He led the attack and posed a threat to American democracy.

“Democracy is still in danger,” said Benny Thompson, a lawmaker who chaired the panel.

“Jan. “The sixth was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one insurgent put it, to overthrow the government after January 6,” Thompson said. “The violence was not accidental.”

In a never-before-seen video clip, the panel joked with former Attorney General Bill Barry, who confirmed he had told Trump that the election rigging allegations were “absurd.”

In another, the former president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified before the committee that she respected Barry’s view that there was no electoral fraud. “I understood what he said.”

Others showed sworn extremist leaders and proud children preparing to support Trump at the Capitol building. The rebels told the committee, one after another, that they had come to Capitol Hill because Trump had asked.

“President Trump has summoned a violent mob,” said Liz Cheney, an R-Wyo congresswoman. “When the president does not take the necessary measures to keep our union – or worse, provokes a constitutional crisis – we are in the moment of maximum danger for our republic.

A loud sigh erupted from the auditorium as Cheney read a report saying that when Trump was told that the Capitol crowd was screaming for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence, Trump replied that he might have been right to say that “he deserved it”. .”

Trump was outraged that Pence, who led Congress that day, refused his order to deny Biden’s victory.

Police officers fighting the crowd took comfort as they sat in the committee room on January 6, reminiscing about the violence. Officer Harry Dunn burst into tears as body camera footage showed rebels beating their colleagues with flags and baseball bats.

US Capitol Police Officer Carolyn Edwards told the panel in personal testimony that she was drenched in someone else’s blood when protesters pushed her toward the Capitol. He suffered brain injuries during the collision.

“It was a massacre, it was chaos,” he said.

Biden told the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles that many viewers “will see a lot of detail of what happened for the first time.”

Donald Trump reopened the investigation and even said on social media that January 6 was “the biggest movement in the history of our country”.

House Judiciary Committee Republicans wrote on Twitter: “Everyone. Old one. news.”

The outcome of the two-hour hearing and the weeks after the public hearing may not change hearts or minds in a politically polarized America. But the committee’s investigation of 1,000 interviews aims to make the story a public record. The final report aims to present the most violent attack on the Capitol since the British burned it down in 1814 and ensure that such an attack is not repeated.

More than 100 police were injured in the riots, many beaten and bloodied as a mob of pro-Trump rebels, some armed with pipes, bats and bear spray, stormed the Capitol. At least nine people who were there died during and after the riot, including a woman who was killed by police at gunpoint.

Emotions on the Capitol are still running high and security in the session has been tight. Law enforcement officials said threats against members of Congress had increased.

In that context, the committee was speaking for a divided America ahead of the fall midterms, when voters decide which party controls Congress. Most television networks broadcast the audience live. The Fox News channel does not.

The committee’s chairman, civil rights leader Thompson, opened the hearing on American history. He said he heard from those who denied the harsh reality of January 6, his own experience growing up in a time and place where “people were justifying slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and Lynch”.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, highlighted what the committee learned from the events that followed January, when Trump sent his supporters to Congress to “fight like crazy” for his presidency because lawmakers routinely did their jobs. . Verification of the results of the previous November month.

Among them was documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who filmed proud children storming the Capitol between then-President Henry “Enrique” Tario and another extremist group, the Oath Keepers, in a nearby parking lot the night before. .

Court documents show that members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were still considering in November the need to fight to keep Trump in office. Since then, the leaders of both groups and some members have been accused of insurgency unusual for a military-style attack.

Among the public were several deputies who were locked in the gallery of the house at the time of the attack.

“We want to remind people that we were there, we saw what happened,” said Dean Phillips Representative D-Minn. “We know how close we are to the first peaceful transition of power in this country.”

In the coming weeks, the panel is expected to detail Trump’s public “Stop Theft” campaign and the private pressure it has exerted on the Justice Department to reverse its electoral defeat, despite dozens of failed court cases and confirmation of your attorney general. No fraud on a scale that could tip the results in his favor.

The panel encountered obstacles early on. Republicans blocked the formation of an independent body that could investigate the January 6 attack in the same way that the 9/11 Commission investigated the 2001 terrorist attack.

Instead, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi launched the panel on Jan. 6 by Congress due to opposition from Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. He rejected Republican-nominated lawmakers who voted against verifying the results of the Jan. 6 election, naming seven Democrats and two Republicans.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, who is involved in the investigation and is not breaking the committee’s request for an interview, responded to Trump on Thursday. He called the panel a “fraud” and called the investigation a political “smokescreen” for Democrats’ priorities.

Audiences are expected to introduce Americans to a group of characters, some familiar, some unreachable, and what they said and did when Trump and his allies tried to change the election outcome.

The Justice Department arrested and charged more than 800 people with violence that day, the most in its history.