January 6 panel summons Trump to testify on Capitol attack

The House Jan. 6 committee voted Thursday to summon Donald Trump to testify before the panel on the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

The panel voted unanimously to force the former president to appear.

“We must testify under the January 6 Central Player Oath,” said Representative Liz Cheney, R-Vyo, the committee’s vice chairman.

Read also | Trump’s ‘wild’ rally tweet was ‘call to arms’: Jan 6 committee

A January 6 panel shows previously unseen footage of Congress leaders calling on officials for help during the Capitol siege.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer can be seen speaking to governors in the neighboring states of Virginia and Maryland. Later footage shows Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders as the group asks the acting attorney general for help.

“They’re breaking the law in many different ways – quite frankly at the behest of the President United States of americaPelosi is heard saying this at one point.

The US House January 6 committee plans to vote on Thursday for former President Donald Trump to testify, as it presented interviews with his aides and new documents detailing his unfinished multi-party strategy to reverse his 2020 election loss. The details of the part attempts were given.

The vote seeking Trump’s testimony comes as the panel is offering new details and evidence of Trump’s state of mind as he refuses to admit his election defeat to Joe Biden, which resulted in the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

In never-before-seen Secret Service messages, the panel offered evidence that the way extremist groups provided muscle in the fight for Trump’s presidency, planning to send a violent force into Washington weeks before the attack .

“Their plan is literally to kill people,” read a tip sent to the Secret Service more than a week before the January 6 violence.

The Secret Service warned in a tip email dated December 26, 2020, that members of the right-wing Proud Boys had planned to march into Washington on January 6, with a group large enough to outnumber police.

“It felt like the calm before the storm,” a Secret Service agent wrote in the group chat.

The House panel warned that the uprising at the Capitol was not an isolated incident but a warning of the fragility of the country’s democracy in the post-Trump era.

Read also | Tough contest: on US election results

“None of this is normal or acceptable or lawful in a republic,” Republican Representative Liz Cheney said.

“There is no defense that Donald Trump was deceived or irrational. No president can disregard the rule of law and act as such in a constitutional republic, period. ,

Democratic Chairman Benny Thompson said the 10th public session, weeks before the congressional midterm election, was engrossed in Trump’s “state of mind”.

The committee is beginning to reconcile its findings that after Republican Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, an unprecedented effort was launched to prevent Congress from attesting to Democrat Biden’s victory. The result was a storm of the Capitol crowd.

Thompson and Cheney’s statements were filled with language often seen in criminal prosecutions. Both lawmakers described Trump as “substantially” involved in the January 6 events. Cheney said Trump had acted in a “pre-planned” manner.

To illustrate what had been called “objective lies,” the committee repeatedly combined examples of top administration officials telling Trump the real facts, with clips of his exes in the Ellipse on Jan. -Repeating the exact opposite in Riot Rally.

The committee may well make decisions about making criminal referrals to the Justice Department.

Thursday’s hearing opened in a mostly empty Capitol complex, with most lawmakers campaigning for re-election at home. Many who were in the thousands around the Capitol on January 6 are now running for Congressional office, some with support for Trump. Police officers fighting the crowd filled the front row of the hearing room.

To illustrate the president’s mindset, the committee uncovered new material, including interviews with Trump’s top cabinet officials, aides and aides, with some of the president admitting he was defeated.

In one, according to former White House official Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump looked at a television and said, “Can you believe I lost to this (abusive) man?”

The committee is also considering the collection of 1.5 million documents obtained from the US Secret Service, including an email dated December 11, 2020, the day the Supreme Court opened one of the main lawsuits brought by Trump’s team against the election results. was rejected.

“Just for your information. POTUS is outraged,” wrote the Secret Service, according to documents obtained by the committee.

White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, remembered Trump as “vivid” and “fired” about the court’s decision.

Trump told Meadows “to some effect: ‘I don’t want people to know we’re lost, Mark. It’s embarrassing. Understand it,'” Hutchinson told the panel in a recorded interview.

Cabinet members, including former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General William Barr and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, also said in interviews shown at the hearing that they believed that once the legal avenues were exhausted, Trump would remain efforts should have come to an end. in power.

“In my view, that was the end of the matter,” Barr said of the December 14 Electoral College vote.

But rather than the end of Trump’s efforts to stay in power, the committee indicated it was only the beginning — as the president called a crowd to Washington for a rally on January 6 to contest the election.

The session was serving as a closing argument for the panel’s two Republican lawmakers, Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kizinger of Illinois, who have essentially been sacked by Trump and his party and will not return to the new Congress. Cheney lost his primary election, and Kinzinger chose not to run.

Another committee member, Rep. Elaine Luria, D-VA, a retired Navy commander, is in a tough reelection bid against State Sen. Jane Keegans, a former Navy helicopter pilot.

The panel was expected to share information from its most recent interviews — including testimony from Ginny Thomas, conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She was in touch with the White House during the run till January 6.

The committee conducted more than 1,500 interviews and obtained countless documents that comprehensively investigated Trump’s activities, from his defeat in the November election to the Capitol attack.

“They have used this big lie to destabilize our democracy,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D.Y., who was a young House staff member during the 1974 Richard Nixon impeachment investigation. “When did that thought happen to him and did he know when he was doing it?”

This week’s hearing is to be the final presentation by lawmakers ahead of the mid-term elections. But employees say the investigation is ongoing.

The January 6 committee, set up by the House, has been meeting for more than a year after Republican senators blocked the formation of an external panel similar to the 9/11 commission set up after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Even after the launch of its high-profile public hearing last summer, the January 6 committee continued to gather evidence and interviews.

Under the committee’s rules, on January 6 the panel is to submit a report of its findings, which is likely to take place in December. The committee would dissolve 30 days after the publication of that report and with the new Congress in January.

House Republicans are expected to drop the January 6 probe and turn to other investigations if they win control after the midterm election, focusing primarily on Biden, his family and his administration.

At least five people were killed in the January 6 attack and the subsequent attack, in which a Trump supporter was shot dead by Capitol police.

Police often engaged in bloody, hand-to-hand combat as Trump supporters pushed past barricades, stormed the Capitol and roamed the halls, escorting lawmakers to safety and authenticating Biden’s election. The joint session of Congress was temporarily interrupted.

More than 850 people have been indicted by the Justice Department in the Capitol attack, some receiving lengthy prison sentences for their roles. Several leaders and allies of the extremist Oath Keepers and Proud Boys have been charged with treason.

Trump faces various state and federal investigations for his actions in the election and its aftermath.