WASHINGTON (AP) – In its first three hearings, the panel of the House investigating the Capitol insurrection has set out the beginnings of its case against former President Donald Trump: his lies about the 2020 elections and his pressure on its vice-president to annul it. , directly provoked the violence on January 6, 2021.
The June committee hearings — at least two more are scheduled — come after a year-long investigation and more than 1,000 interviews. The panel has presented both live testimonies and videos, including interviews with many of Trump’s closest advisers who tried to dissuade him from his efforts to stay in power. The committee also showed a video of the violent attack that day, some of which had never been seen before.
Methodically outlining their initial findings, nine-member panel members say they are trying to remind a tired audience of what was at stake that day and what would have happened if Vice President Mike Pence and others had not thwarted Trump’s efforts to annul his defeat. They are also gathering a wealth of evidence that the Department of Justice wants to use in its own investigations.
A summary of what we’ve learned so far from the select committee’s January 6 public hearings, and what follows:
THINK OF PRESSURE
Thursday’s committee hearing focused on Trump’s pressure on his vice president after all 50 states certified President Joe Biden’s victory, and courts across the country had rejected attempts by his campaign to legally challenge them. results. When the president ran out of options, he and a small group of allies headed for the final certification of Congress on January 6th.
The Vice President presides over this session every four years in a ceremonial role. Driven by a professor of constitutional law named John Eastman, Trump pressured Pence to defy the law and hundreds of years of precedent, intervening to oppose or delay the count.
Greg Jacob, Pence’s adviser, said the vice president was determined from the start not to carry out the plan. “Our review of the text, the history and, frankly, only common sense, confirm the vice president’s first instinct on this point, there is no justified basis for concluding that the vice president has that kind of authority,” Jacob said. to the committee live. witness Thursday.
But Trump stepped up his pressure in the days leading up to the certification, culminating in a call that aides described as “hot” between the two men on the morning of Jan. 6, a cry for Pence to “do the right thing.” in a large rally of his supporters that morning and finally with a tweet saying that Pence had no “courage” as a violent mob was already entering the building. The committee chronicled this timeline with video interviews of White House aides, clips of Trump’s speech, and footage of the angry crowd calling for Pence’s assassination.
In a video played by the committee, a Trump supporter said he had heard reports that Pence had “yielded” and that if he did, they would drag “politicians down the streets.” Crowds demanded that Pence be hanged as they entered the building.
The panel also filled in new details about Pence’s hasty evacuation of the Senate when the riots began. California Rep. Pete Aguilar, a committee Democrat who led Thursday’s hearing, told Jacob that the group was at one point just 40 feet from the mutineers.
TRUMP’S ASSISTANTS TALK
While some of Trump’s top allies challenged the summonses to testify, the committee spoke with many of its top aides, including several who were in the White House that day and were in meetings the previous weeks such as Trump, Eastman and the United States. Lawyer Rudy Giuliani, among a small group of other people, pushed the plan to undo Trump’s defeat.
The panel played video testimonial clips in which attendees say they disagreed with the plan or tried to convince the president, although few of them spoke publicly at the time.
These efforts to persuade Trump began on election night, when the race was still too close to convene and Giuliani pushed the president to declare victory. Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in an interview clip played by the panel that he told Trump it was “too early” to make a prediction like this, but Trump came out in the newsroom and he did so anyway, telling reporters that the first results were “a fraud on the American public” and that “frankly, we won this election.”
The committee also showed a video of the testimony of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner. In a clip from her interview earlier this year, Ivanka Trump told the panel that her father’s call with Pence on the morning of January 6 was “quite heated” and had “a different tone from the I had heard from the vice president before. ” Others described vulgarities that he said the president used.
The committee did not publish the full transcripts of the interviews.
NO EVIDENCE OF FRAUD
At Monday’s second hearing, the panel showed evidence that Trump’s allegations of widespread election fraud were false. While election officials across the country certified the results and the courts rejected Trump’s numerous demands, the president and his allies repeatedly argued that it was true.
The committee used video clips of witnesses from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who resigned after telling the chairman his claims were “shit.” Barr said he had investigated the allegations and found no evidence that any of them were true. He described his interactions with the president as he tried to convince him of the facts, and told the panel that Trump was “deviating from reality.”
Eyewitnesses to the committee hearing Monday spoke of pressure from Trump and Giuliani to try to overturn the results in their states. BJay Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta who resigned when Trump pressured Georgian officials, said his office investigated Giuliani’s “reckless” allegations about state fraud and found that they were ” just fake. “
THAT FOLLOWS
The commission has scheduled two additional hearings this month and more are expected. A hearing on Tuesday is expected to focus on state officials who were contacted by Trump and the White House while trying to undo the results. Additional hearings will look at Trump’s pressure on the Justice Department to declare the election “corrupt” and what was happening in the White House as the violence unfolded.
After the hearings, the investigation will continue. The court plans to issue the final reports by the end of the year. Investigators have yet to say whether they will try to call Pence or Trump to testify, either in private or in public.
SHARE TRANSCRIPTIONS
The Justice Department has stepped up its own investigation and asked the Jan. 6 panel to provide transcripts of its 1,000 interviews. The committee has declined so far, but said it is engaged in a “cooperation process” with the department.
“We believe responsibility is important and will not be an obstacle to prosecuting the department,” committee spokesman Tim Mulvey said in a statement on Friday.
In a letter on Wednesday, the Justice Department said the panel was complicating its investigations by not sharing,
“It is now clear that the interviews conducted by the select committee are not only potentially relevant to our general criminal investigations, but are likely to be relevant to specific prosecutions that have already been praised,” federal prosecutors wrote to Tim. Heaphy, chief research adviser to the committee. .
Mississippi MP Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Jan. 6 panel, told reporters Thursday that lawmakers will formally respond to prosecutors. But he added, “We will not stop what we are doing to share the information we have obtained so far with the Department of Justice.”
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Associated Press writer Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.