January 6th Committee Releases Final Report As New Details Are Disclosed Of Donald Trump’s Efforts To Overturn 2020 Presidential Election — Read It Here
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UPDATED: Days after the January 6 Committee recommended four staggering criminal charges against former president Donald Trump, the panel this evening released its final report.
“Our country has come too far to allow a defeated president to turn himself into a successful tyrant by upending our democratic institutions, fomenting violence, and, as I saw it, opening the door to those in our country whose hatred and bigotry threaten equality and justice for all Americans,” Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson wrote in his opening statement.
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The 845-page document is here.
CNN and MSNBC covered the release as breaking news, but Fox News largely avoided it as the report came during the 9 PM hour of The Ingraham Angle.
The release comes after the committee began to release transcripts of committee interviews, including those with Cassidy Hutchinson, the former aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows, who detailed the pressure she was put under by Trump loyalists not to recall key details of the events leading up to January 6th. Hutchinson, who was one of the committee’s star witnesses, told the panel in September that Stefan Passantino, a former Trump White House lawyer who initially represented her, wanted her to focus on protecting Trump when she went before the committee. She also said that her boss, Meadows, told her that Trump knew that he lost the election but pressed forward with his false election claims anyway.
The 18-month investigation came to a conclusion as control of Congress shifts to Republicans next month. GOP leadership criticized the committee’s work and ostracized to Republicans who were among its members: Rep. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, both of whom were not reelected.
As she did earlier this week, Cheney wrote in the report that among the “most shameful findings from our hearings” was testimony that Trump sat in “the dining room off the Oval Office watching the violent riot at the Capitol on television.”
“For hours, he would not issue a public statement instructing his supporters to disperse and leave the Capitol, despite urgent pleas from his White House staff and dozens of others to do so,” Cheney wrote, calling Trump’s behavior a “dereliction of duty” and adding, “No man who would behave that way at that moment in time can ever serve in any position of authority in our nation again. He is unfit for any office.”
Much of the information from the report was revealed to the public during the course of 11 hearings during the summer and fall, laying out a narrative of the January 6th attack in a way that captivated much of Washington media and drew a solid audience. Some of the details, like text messages that Fox News host Sean Hannity sent to Mark Meadows, urging him to try to get Trump to put out a statement as the attack unfolded, were released last year.
But the report, like the hearings themselves, was designed to lay out its findings in an easily to understand way, even in mammoth length. The first chapter of the report is titled “The Big Lie,” which became shorthand for Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. The chapter starts with Trump declaring victory on Election Night, even though millions of mail-in votes, expected to favor Joe Biden, had yet to be counted. “So, the President of the United States did something he had planned todo long before election day: he lied,” the report stated. The only adviser who supported Trump’s intention to declare victory that evening was Rudy Giuliani, who campaign adviser Jason Miller had testified was “definitely intoxicated” that evening.
On Monday, the committee voted to refer to the Justice Department four criminal charges against Trump, including obstruction of an official proceeding; conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to make a false statement; and inciting, assisting or giving aid and comfort to an insurrection.
“From the outset of its hearings, the Committee has explained that President Trump and a number of other individuals made a series of very specific plans, ultimately with multiple separate elements, but all with one overriding objective: to corruptly obstruct, impede, or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th, and thereby overturn the lawful results of the election.”
The committee also released a set of recommendations, including barring Trump and others from holding office. They note that under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, “an individual who previously took an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, but who has ‘engaged in an insurrection’ against the same, or given ‘aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution’ can be disqualified from holding future federal or state office.”
Other recommendations include giving congressional committees a ’cause of action” to enforce its subpoenas in federal court, as a number of potential witnesses did not comply. Other recommendations had to do with intelligence sharing between federal agencies of threats of violent extremism. One proposal, to make clear that the vice president’s role in the counting of electoral votes is ceremonial, is poised to become law. It was included as part of the year-end omnibus bill, which the Senate passed today and the House will vote on on Friday.
Another recommendation has to do with the social and traditional media, targeting the wealth of misinformation that spread among right wing commentators, podcast hosts and other outlets. Two election systems companies, Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic, have sued Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network for billions of dollars over post-election claims made by hosts and guests.
“The Committee agrees that individuals remain responsible for their own actions, including their own criminal actions,” the report stated. “But congressional committees of jurisdiction should continue to evaluate policies of media companies that have had the effect of radicalizing their consumers, including by provoking people to attack their own country.”
The report noted instances where Trump also falsely claimed that Dominion was involved in election rigging, but the former president has yet to be named by the company as a defendant in a defamation lawsuit.
According to the report, among those who weighed in on the effort to reverse the results was Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy.
According to the report, Ruddy “had President Trump’s ear and reportedly spoke with him by phone at least four times before December. He forwarded a memo to other close advisors of the President recommending that the Trump team persuade one or more Republican-led chambers in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and even Minnesota to ‘pick a separate competitive State slate of Electors,’ which the memo predicted might turn January 6th into ‘a cat-fight in Congress wherein VP Pence is Presiding.” The report also includes a number of references to Maria Bartiromo’s interview with Trump on Nov. 29, 2020, the first he gave since the election, in which he again made numerous unfounded claims about the election.
Ruddy, though, denies that allegation in the report.
A spokesperson said, “Mr. Ruddy denies the claims made about him in the January 6 report. He has always advised Donald Trump to accept the election results and he never suggested to him or anyone a challenge to those results, nor did he ever author or forward a memo to anyone at the White House for such a purpose.”
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