WASHINGTON (AP) – His campaign team, data analysts and a steady stream of lawyers, investigators and allies in the inner circle have told Donald Trump the same thing over and over again: there was no voting fraud that could to have leaned towards 2020. presidential elections.
But in the eight weeks since losing to Joe Biden, the publicly, privately and relentlessly defeated Trump propelled his false claims of a rigged 2020 election and intensified an extraordinary scheme to nullify Biden’s victory. When all else failed in his effort to stay in power, Trump signaled thousands of his supporters to Washington on January 6, 2021, where extremist groups led the deadly siege of the Capitol.
The scale and virulence of this scheme began to take shape in the audience of the inaugural session of the committee investigating 1/6. The prime-time hearing was seen by some 20 million people on television networks, nearly double the number that tuned in to the opening of Trump’s two impeachment trials.
When the panel resumes on Monday, it will deepen its findings that Trump and his advisers knew from the beginning that he had in fact lost the election, but that they made a “massive effort” to spread false information to convince the public otherwise.
Biden spoke about the importance of the committee’s investigation in statements Friday in Los Angeles. “The January 6 uprising was one of the darkest chapters in the history of our nation,” the president said, “a brutal assault on our democracy.”
The Americans, he said, must “understand what really happened and understand that the same forces that led on January 6 are still working today.”
The House panel investigating the 1/6 attack on the Capitol is ready next week to reveal more details and testimonies about its assessment that Trump was well aware of his election loss. With 1,000 interviews and 140,000 documents during the one-year investigation, he will expose how Trump was repeatedly told there were no hidden ballots, manipulated voting machines or support for his claims. However, Trump refused to accept defeat and his desperate attempt to cling to the presidency sparked the most violent domestic attack on the Capitol in history.
“For several months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-party plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power,” Wyo Republican Rep. Liz Cheney told a hearing Thursday. at night. “Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States,” he said.
On Wednesday, the panel will hear testimony from the highest levels of the Trump-era Justice Department: Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Deputy Chief Richard Donoghue, and Steven Engel, the former head of the Law Office. Legal of the department, according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to talk about his appearances.
The testimony of the three former Justice Department officials is expected to focus on a chaotic stretch in the last weeks of the administration, when Trump openly weighed in on the idea of replacing Rosen with a lower-ranking official, Jeffrey Clark, who he considered himself more willing to do so. defends in court the false claims of the president of electoral fraud.
The situation culminated in an hour-long meeting at the White House on January 3, 2021, attended by Rosen, Donoghue, Engel, and Clark, when senior Justice Department officials and White House attorneys attended. they told Trump he would resign if he went. forward with his plan to replace Rosen. The president finally let Rosen end the administration as acting attorney general.
Thursday will focus on Trump’s efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count election votes on Jan. 6, a scheme proposed to the White House by outside attorney John Eastman. During the uprising, rioters roamed the Capitol corridors shouting “Hang Mike Pence” when the vice president rejected Trump’s plan to cancel the 2020 election.
“I’d like the truth to come out,” Ken Sicknick, whose brother, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, died after suffering a stroke while defending the Capitol, CNN said Friday.
He said, while the family received countless condolences after the death of his brother, including the vice president, “not a tweet, not a note, not a card, nothing” from Trump. “Because he knows he’s the cause of it all.”
The hearings are intended to be the public record of the attack and the circumstances surrounding it and could give rise to references for prosecution. With Trump considering another White House call, the committee’s final report seeks to account for the most violent attack on the Capitol since 1814.
Trump responded on Friday to his social media site, denouncing the “witch hunt!” although he fully acknowledged that he refused to accept defeat.
“A lot of people told me about the election results, both for and against, but I never hesitated,” he said, citing his false claim of a stolen election.
Trump said January 6 “represented the largest movement in our country’s history.”
At first, the panel directly blamed Trump for the insurgency, saying the assault was not spontaneous, but a “coup attempt” driven by Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
With a new 12-minute video of extremist groups leading the deadly siege and a startling testimony from Trump’s inner circle, the committee offered new details of a democracy in danger.
“Gener. 6 was the culmination of a coup attempt, “said Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., Chair of the panel.” The violence was not accidental. “
In a video clip never seen before, the panel echoed a comment by former Attorney General Bill Barr, who stated that he told Trump that the allegations of a rigged election were “bulls …”.
In another clip, the former president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified before the committee that he respected Barr’s view that there was no election fraud. “I accepted what he said.”
Others showed extremist leaders Oath Keepers and Proud Boys preparing to storm the Capitol to defend Trump. One rioter after another told the committee that they came to the Capitol because Trump asked them to.
In a heartbreaking testimony, U.S. Capitol police officer Caroline Edwards told the panel that she had slipped into other people’s blood as the rioters pushed her toward the Capitol. He suffered brain injuries in hand-to-hand combat.
“It was a carnage. It was chaos,” he said.
The riot left more than 100 policemen wounded, many beaten and bloodied, while the crowd of Trump supporters, some armed with pipes, bats and bear spray, charged at the Capitol. At least nine people were killed during or after the riots, including a woman who was shot dead by police.
Judicial documents show that members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were already discussing in November the need to fight to keep Trump in office. Since then, leaders of both groups and some members have been charged with rare charges of sedition for the military-style attack.
The Justice Department has arrested and charged more than 800 people for the violence of that day, the largest drag network in its history.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in Los Angeles on Friday that the committee’s purpose is to “seek the truth” to make sure that “never again will anyone think it’s okay to have a coup, to have an assault on the United States Capitol “. , an attack on the democracy of our country ”.
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Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick, Farnoush Amir, Kevin Freking, Michael Balsamo, Jill Colvin, Darlene Superville and Zeke Miller in Washington and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this report.
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For full coverage of the January 6 hearings, go to