The House Select Committee, which is investigating the January 6, 2021 uprising, is recommending that former President Donald Trump run for re-election.
The recommendation is one of the conclusions of the panel’s final report released late Thursday. This is an in-depth look at the bipartisan panel’s findings about how Trump and his allies tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The 845-page report, based on more than 1,000 interviews, collected documents including emails, texts, phone records and a year-and-a-half investigation, includes allegations that Trump “oversaw” legally dubious efforts to submit fake voter rolls. seven states he lost, arguing that evidence showed he actively worked to “transfer Electoral College ballots to Congress and the National Archives,” despite concerns from his lawyers that it might be illegal.
In a symbolic move Monday, the committee referred at least four criminal charges to Trump’s Justice Department in its last public meeting, but said in its summary that it had evidence of possible charges of conspiracy to injure or obstruct an officer and conspiracy to riot.
“This evidence has led to an overwhelming and straightforward conclusion: The central cause of January 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump, who was followed by many others. None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him,” the report said.
The chairman of the committee, Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, said Monday that he has every confidence that the committee’s work will help create a road map for justice and that the agencies and institutions charged with ensuring justice under the law will use that information. we have helped their work.”
Special counsel Jack Smith is leading the Justice Department’s investigations into Trump, including both his post-election actions and classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort earlier this year.
Trump quickly slammed the report on his Truth Social platform with false claims about the rebellion and the 2020 election. He did not address the specific findings of the report, which he called “very biased,” but instead falsely blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the security breach that day and reiterated his baseless allegations of election fraud.
The report contains the following information:
In an effort to overturn election results in key states, Trump and his inner circle targeted election officials for “at least 200 overt acts of public or private notification, pressure or condemnation” between Election Day and the Jan. 6 attack. report.
There were 68 meetings, attempted or related phone calls or text messages directed at state or local officials, as well as 125 social media posts by Trump or senior aides directed at state officials.
Trump “led an outreach effort targeting many incumbents in states he lost but had GOP-led legislatures, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona,” the report said. (He lost all those states.)
For example, during a Jan. 2, 2021 call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the then-president went through a “litany of election fraud allegations” and then asked Raffensperger to give him a second term, “finding” just enough votes to ensure victory, according to the report.
Trump infamously said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, one more than we got because we won the state.”
The Jan. 6 committee identifies a little-known pro-Trump attorney as the original architect of the legally dubious fake voter scheme: Kenneth Chesebro.
Conservative attorney John Eastman wrote a now-infamous memo detailing step-by-step how then-Vice President Mike Pence could theoretically overturn the 2020 election results. But the committee points to Chesebro, a known associate of Eastman, as responsible for creating the fake voter conspiracy.
“The voter fraud scheme emerged from a series of legal memoranda written by the Trump campaign’s outside legal counsel, Kenneth Chesebro,” the report said.
It was previously known that Chesebro was involved in a fake voter scheme, but the committee’s finding about his leadership role is new.
Efforts to submit fraudulent pro-Trump voter sheets are being monitored by federal and state prosecutors investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The committee wrote that Chesebro sent a memo to then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani after a request from Trump campaign official Boris Epshteyn about the “President of the Senate” strategy, which falsely stated that the vice president could choose which presidential electors to consider. In a joint session of Congress on January 6.
“Just prior to January 6, President Trump was involved in the creation of the plan by Chesebro, a Boston and New York-based attorney who was recruited to assist the Trump campaign as volunteer legal counsel,” the report said. “Chesebro’s December 18, 9, and 13 memos, as discussed below, set the stage for the plan.”
CNN has previously asked Chesebro for comment on these issues and has not responded.
Eastman contacted Trump on December 23, 2020, the same day he drafted his original memo on the Pence theory.
Eastman sent an email to Trump assistant Molly Michael at 1:32 p.m., according to the committee. “Is the president available for a very quick call at any point today? I just want to update him on our overall strategic thinking.
The committee wrote that Eastman received a call from the White House switchboard and that the call lasted 23 minutes, according to Eastman’s phone records. Eastman’s two-page memo discussed various ways to ensure President Trump’s re-election, even though by then the committee believed he had lost the election.
These new details show how the commission used emails and phone calls it received after it successfully fought in court to obtain the documents.
The commission obtained Eastman’s emails after a judge sided with the House in a case accusing both Eastman and Trump of criminal conspiracy to obstruct Congress and defraud the government.
Trump seized on Eastman’s theories that he incorrectly suggested Pence could overturn the election and began a pressure campaign against Pence in the days leading up to Jan. 6. Eastman was present for the Jan. 4, 2021, meeting between Trump and Pence in the Oval Office, where Trump tried to convince Pence that he could intervene when Congress confirmed the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6.
Banning Trump from further public office is one of 11 recommendations the committee will make as a result of its investigation.
The panel invalidates a section of the Constitution that states that a person who has taken an oath to support the US Constitution but has “taken part in an insurrection” or given “aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution” can be disqualified from office. . The committee has referred the former president and others to the Justice Department for aiding and abetting the rebellion.
It calls on congressional jurisdictional committees to create a “formal mechanism” to assess whether those individuals who violate this section of the 14th Amendment should be barred from future federal or state office.
In addition to criminal proceedings, the special commission calls for the prosecution of lawyers involved in efforts to annul the election.
“Those courts and attorney disciplinary bodies responsible for overseeing the legal profession in states and the District of Columbia should continue to evaluate the conduct of attorneys described in this report,” the panel writes, adding that there are specific attorneys the report identifies. conflicts of interest” is assessed by the Ministry of Justice.
The report even calls on Congress to amend the statute and consider the severity of penalties that deter individuals from attempting to obstruct, influence, or obstruct a joint session of Congress that certifies election results. It calls for tougher federal sentencing statutes for certain types of threats against election workers.
Although the panel was able to get more than 1,000 witnesses to testify as part of its investigation, it still had difficulty getting the cooperation of everyone it wanted to speak to. Its report recommends that congressional jurisdiction committees “develop legislation” to create a “cause of action” for Congress to enforce its subpoena in federal court.
One suggestion may soon become a reality.
The panel is calling on Congress to pass an overhaul of the Election Counting Act of 1887 aimed at making it harder to overturn a certified presidential election, the first legislative response to the uprising and Trump’s relentless campaign to stay in power.
The House and Senate have each passed their own version of the legislation.
A House committee lays out several criminal laws it believes were broken in the plot to prevent Trump’s defeat, and says there is evidence Trump, Eastman and “other” criminal cases were referred to the Justice Department.
A summary of the report released Monday said there was evidence to prosecute Trump for several crimes, including obstruction of official proceedings, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to commit perjury, aiding and abetting an insurrection, conspiracy to injure or obstruct an officer and seditious conspiracy.
The panel says it also has evidence to charge Eastman with obstruction and names him as a co-conspirator in other alleged criminal activity that lawmakers have gathered evidence of.
The committee cited evidence of criminal obstruction of the parliamentary inquiry, but the summary does not go into detail about that evidence.
The committee cites 17 findings from its investigation that support its rationale for the felony referral, including the fact that Trump knew the fraud allegations against him were false and continued to amplify them.
“President Trump’s decision to declare his victory false on election night and illegally demand that the vote be stopped was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated,” the report states.
The committee also revealed emails from Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, ahead of the 2020 presidential election, saying Trump should declare victory regardless of the outcome.
It notes that key Trump allies, including those who testified before the committee, admitted they found no evidence to support the former president’s claims.
“Ultimately, even Rudolph Giuliani and his legal team admitted that they did not have conclusive evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the outcome of the election,” it added, citing Trump’s personal attorney at the time.
“For example, while Giuliani had repeatedly claimed in public that Dominion’s voting machines stole the election, he testified before his election commission that ‘I don’t believe the machines stole the election,'” it said.
Committee investigators describe how fundraising calls by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee that included false claims about a stolen election ultimately raised more than $250 million but were met with internal resistance.
The researchers describe three options that the campaign considered as a post-election fundraising appeal. One option the campaign decided against using because they knew it was wrong was saying Trump won. Another missed opportunity said the campaign is awaiting results. The committee said the Trump campaign ultimately approved a message that Democrats were out to “steal the election,” written before election night.
The committee describes, based on interviews with Trump campaign officials, that much of the material in the fundraising emails was based on Trump’s messages but was not checked for accuracy before being used to solicit donations.
“President Trump’s claims were treated as true and delivered to millions of people tasked with ensuring accuracy with little or no input,” the committee wrote.
Zach Parkinson, the Trump campaign’s deputy director of communications and research, told investigators that the accuracy review was limited to “questions about things like time and location.”
The RNC eventually changed some of the messages that the committee said showed “the RNC knew that President Trump’s claims about winning the election were baseless” and made “changes to fundraising copy that appeared to shield the RNC from legal exposure,” according to investigators.
House investigators said RNC lawyers told copywriters not to use the term “fake,” according to interviews conducted by the committee. The panel received several examples of fundraising appeals that were accurate and less inflammatory.
White House communications director Hope Hicks told a committee Jan. 6 that Donald Trump laughed off one of his election lawyers’ claims about foreign interference in the election, calling them crazy, according to the committee’s final report.
“The day after the press conference, President Trump spoke by phone with Sidney Powell from the Oval Office. During the speech, Powell repeated the same claims about foreign election meddling that he made at the press conference,” the report said, referring to Trump’s one-time lawyer Powell’s conspiracy claims in a bizarre press conference after the 2020 election.
“As he spoke, the president muted the loudspeaker and laughed at Powell, telling others in the room, ‘That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?'” the report said.
During the press conference, Powell falsely claimed, among other things, that voting machines widely used by the election technology company Dominion Voting Systems contained software created at the “direction” of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to change his election results, and that the company has ties to the Clinton Foundation and George Soros.
“A few days later, the Trump campaign issued a statement saying Powell was not part of the Trump campaign’s legal team. But Powell’s outlandish claims were no different from those made by President Trump himself,” the committee wrote.
The committee describes Trump’s failure to act when the riots broke out, noting that he did not call for security assistance while watching the riots on television and resisted efforts by staff to ask him to recall his supporters.
“President Trump did not contact any top national security official during the day. Not at the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Capitol Police or the D.C. Mayor’s Office,” the committee wrote. “As Vice President Pence has confirmed, President Trump did not even try to reach his Vice President to make sure Pence was safe.”
Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the committee that his reaction to Trump was: “You know, you’re the commander in chief. You’ve got an attack on the United States Capitol going on. And nothing? No calls? Nothing? Zero?”
Meanwhile, White House staffers described their dismay that Trump sent a tweet criticizing Pence while the Capitol was under attack.
Hicks texted a colleague that night to “attack the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” the committee’s summary report states.
“There will be no photographs of the President for the remainder of the afternoon until after 4 p.m. President Trump appears to have directed that no photographs be taken by the White House photographer,” the committee wrote, citing testimony from former White House photographer Shealah Craighead.
Afterward, on the evening of Jan. 6, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale told Katrina Pierson, one of the rally’s organizers, that he felt guilty for helping Trump win, the report said.
Parscale said the day’s events stemmed from “a sitting president seeking civil war.”
Trump’s tone during his last known phone call on January 6 was like “wow, can you believe this shit?” according to a White House aide who spoke to him that evening.
In newly released testimony included in the committee’s Jan. 6 final report, aide John McEntee said Trump told him “[t]his is a crazy day.” The report added: “McEntee said her tone was ‘like, wow, can you believe this shit?’
McEntee told the panel that Trump did not express sadness over the violence at the Capitol that day.
“I think he was shocked that it got a little bit out of control, but I don’t remember a lot of sadness,” McEntee said.
He wasn’t the only person who got that impression of Trump’s mood.
Ivanka Trump, a senior White House adviser at the time, told the special committee that her father was “disappointed and surprised” by the attack on the Capitol.
But when pressed by committee investigators, he was unable to produce a single instance in which the president discussed whether or not he did the right thing on January 6, or talked about those who were injured or died that day.
This story has been updated with additional details.
