The select committee of the House investigating the attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, outlined on Tuesday the relentless pressure of Donald Trump to annul the 2020 presidential election, with the aim of proving that provoking widespread personal threats to the administrators of American democracy: election workers. and local officials, who defended the efforts of the defeated president.
The panel resumed focusing on Trump’s efforts to undo Joe Biden’s victory in the most local way, relying on officials on key battlefield states to reject ballots directly or to present alternative voters for to the final bill in Congress. The pressure was fueled by the false statements of the defeated president of electoral fraud which, according to the panel, directly provoked the riots in the Capitol.
Democrat Bennie Thompson, who chairs the committee, said Tuesday, “A handful of election officials in several key states stood between Donald Trump and the vertigo of American democracy.”
The hearing opened with creepy accounts of the onslaught of attacks facing local, mostly Republican, elected officials, including a Michigan lawmaker whose personal phone number was tweeted by Trump to his millions. of followers and another in Pennsylvania who had to disconnect the family home phone line. , which received calls at all hours of the night.
“It has to stop,” Gabriel Sterling, head of operations for the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, pleaded in a 2020 video clip that was shown to the audience.
Liz Cheney, vice chair of the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, delivered the opening speech in Washington, DC on Tuesday (J. Scott Applewhite / The Associated Press)
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice president, urged Americans to pay attention to the evidence presented at the hearings.
“Donald Trump didn’t care about the threats of violence. He didn’t condemn them, he didn’t make any effort to stop them,” Cheney said. “This is serious. We can’t let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and bullying violence.”
The public hearing, the fourth in the panel this month, stemmed from its one-year investigation into Trump’s unprecedented attempt to stay in power, an expansive plan that the January 6 committee chairman he compared it to a “coup attempt.”
Tuesday’s approach revised how Trump was repeatedly told that his pressure campaign could cause violence against local officials and their families, but he pursued it anyway, according to a committee aide. And he stressed that the consequences of Trump’s lies continue, with election officials facing ongoing public harassment and political challengers trying to take over their jobs.
“For the first time in history, the losing presidential candidate struggled to stay in power,” said Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who leads much of Tuesday’s session, in his opening remarks.
“The president’s lie was, and is, a dangerous cancer for the political body,” Schiff said. “If you can convince Americans that they can’t trust their own election, that every time they lose it’s somehow illegitimate, then what’s left is more than violence to determine who should govern.”
TARGET | Deputy Adam Schiff made the opening remarks at the committee hearing on January 6:
False allegations of election fraud “a dangerous cancer,” says the congressman
Proponents of her case have been working to make the actual transcript of this statement available online. United States on January 6, 2021. his opening speech at a committee hearing on Tuesday.
Witnesses suffered harassment, defamation
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Deputy Sterling and Arizona Republican State Speaker Rusty Bowers are key witnesses, along with Wandrea (Shay) Moss, a former election worker. of Georgia who, with her mother, has said they were facing such a serious confrontation. public harassment of Trump allies who felt unable to live a normal life.
Bowers, the first to testify, explained the pressure on Trump and his allies. Despite being a staunch supporter of Trump, Bowers told the committee that he acknowledged that Biden won the November 2020 presidential election.
He said there was no “solid, judicial and quality evidence” to convince him to deny his oath and give in to efforts to overturn the election results.
Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona State House, testifies before the select committee of the House investigating the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol on Tuesday in Washington, DC (Jacquelyn Martin / The Associated Press )
“It’s a principle of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired by the most basic fundamental beliefs. And so doing it because someone just asked me is strange to my own being. I won’t,” Bowers said. dit.
Bowers detailed how not only was his office “saturated” with messages and texts to the point of not being able to work, but he also had to deal with people who intimidated him and his family at home. he drove around his neighborhood with loudspeakers, threatening his neighbors. and making false claims that Bowers is a “pedophile” or a “pervert.”
Focus on efforts to nullify Georgia’s results
Schiff told the Los Angeles Times that the hearing will also investigate the “intimate role” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows played in the plot to pressure Georgia state lawmakers and election officials .
During a recorded call with Raffensperger just days before the Jan. 6 attack, Trump repeatedly cited denied allegations of fraud and raised the possibility of a “criminal offense” if Georgia officials did not help him “find “votes to overcome a deficit. . The state did a hands-on count to match its machine and also conducted an audit in a key county before certifying Biden’s victory in Georgia by 11,779 votes.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is expected to explain at a Jan. 14, 2020, press conference in Atlanta an effort by Donald Trump and Trump’s allies to deny Joe They call for an election victory in Georgia. (John Bazemore / The Associated Press)
Raffensperger’s public testimony comes after he appeared earlier this month before a grand special jury in Georgia investigating whether Trump and others tried to intervene illegally in the state’s 2020 election.
In his 2021 book Integrity Counts, Raffensperger described how Georgia had to “waste taxpayer resources” by pursuing allegations and rumors of voting irregularities by Trump acolytes. He also said he took at least one of Trump’s statements during his phone call as “a threat.”
Sterling, Raffensperger’s chief of operations, became a prominent figure in the long post-election count in Georgia, imploring Americans to heed the heated rhetoric.
TARGET | Georgia election official Gabe Sterling outraged by the “suitcase” claim (January 4, 2021):
Georgia Election Officer: “This has been thoroughly denied”
Gabriel Sterling, Georgia’s voting system implementation manager, accuses U.S. President Donald Trump’s legal team of deliberately misleading the public.
Moss, who has worked in the Fulton County Electoral Department since 2012, and his mother, Ruby Freeman, a temporary election worker, filed a defamation suit in December 2021.
Moss claimed that the conservative channel One America News Network (OAN) and lawyer Rudy Giuliani falsely aired allegations that she and her mother were involved in election fraud during the election. The case against the OAN resulted in an agreement.
Wandrea ‘Shay’ Moss, a former Georgia election worker, has vowed to testify on Tuesday as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal the findings of a year-long investigation. . (Jacquelyn Martin / The Associated Press)
Scheme of substitute voters under control
Bowers, in an interview with The Associated Press after arriving in Washington, DC, before the hearing, said he expected to be asked about a call with Trump during which Giuliani came up with an idea to replace voters. ‘Arizona for those who will vote for Trump.
The select committee of seven Democrats and two Republicans plans to go deeper into the “fake voter” scheme mentioned in previous hearings aimed at stopping Biden’s election victory. The plan was for representatives of up to seven battlefield states to sign certificates falsely stating that Trump, not Biden, had won.
TARGET | Pence’s pressure campaign is presented to the previous audience:
The Jan. 6 committee examines Trump’s pressure on Pence
The U.S. Congress committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot turned its attention to Vice President Mike Pence. Witnesses in Donald Trump’s inner circle told the committee that the former president knew that asking Pence to annul the election results was illegal, but that he still did so anyway.
The idea of fake voters was designed to pose a challenge on January 6, 2021, when Congress met in a joint session, with Vice President Mike Pence presiding over what is usually a ceremonial role in accepting state vote counts. . Pence, the committee heard, resisted Trump’s repeated demands that he simply stop certifying Biden’s victory.
At least 20 people in connection with the fake voter plan have been cited by the House panel.
No credible allegations of widespread electoral fraud in 2020 were made in dozens of cases that went to court and were later dismissed. The Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency described the election in a statement as “the safest in U.S. history.”
In December 2020, William Barr, then the attorney general, told the Associated Press that nothing had been discovered “on a scale that could have produced a different election result.” Barr, in more recent interviews with the House committee, ridiculed some of the allegations of fraud made by Trump and people close to the then president.
Sunday…