Jan. 6 committee lays out damning case against Donald Trump in final report

The House select committee’s report detailing its probe of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection provides overwhelming evidence of former President Donald Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, including multiple instances in which Trump was fully aware that he had lost and examples of potential witness tampering during the panel’s public hearings.

The 845-page report released Thursday presents findings from the panel’s 18-month-long investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021, including Trump’s attempts to undermine the peaceful transfer of power by pushing unfounded claims of voter fraud and pressuring officials in states that he lost to send fake pro-Trump electors to Washington.

It comes as both the Justice Department and prosecutors in Georgia are investigating efforts from Trump and his allies to subvert his 2020 election loss. In its last public meeting, the House select committee on Monday voted unanimously to send criminal referrals against Trump to the Justice Department — the first time the House has recommended criminal charges against a former president.

“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,” the committee said in its report, “to corruptly obstruct, impede, or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th, and thereby overturn the lawful results of the election.”

Trump acknowledged multiple times that he lost 2020 election

Since the night of the 2020 election, Trump has publicly maintained that he was the rightful winner and that Joe Biden’s victory was the result of widespread fraud. But the select committee’s report cites evidence both from the testimony of witnesses and documents obtained in the course of their investigation showing that Trump was well aware that this wasn’t the truth.

Not only did several former Trump advisers testify that they personally informed the president, in some cases repeatedly, that his voter fraud claims were inaccurate, but a number of witnesses also described instances in which Trump himself actually acknowledged that he’d lost.

One such witness was Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide who emerged as a star witness of the committee’s probe with an explosive public testimony earlier this year. During another interview with the select committee in September, the transcript of which was released ahead of the full report, Hutchinson described seven separate occasions between the 2020 election and Jan. 6, 2021 in which she either heard Trump directly acknowledge that he’d lost, or she was told about Trump admitting defeat by someone else. According to the transcript of that interview, Hutchinson also told the Justice Department about these conversations.

For example, Hutchinson described one conversation that she heard between Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows at the White House on Dec. 11, the day the Supreme Court had decided it would not consider a Texas lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results in four battleground states.

Trump was having what Hutchinson called “his typical anger outburst” over the Supreme Court decision when he told Meadows something to the effect of “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

Hutchinson told the committee that Meadows responded by reassuring the president that “We're not quite sure that we lost yet. We’re still figuring some things out.”

Hutchinson said she heard Trump again acknowledge, on Jan. 4, while flying back to the White House from Georgia on Air Force One, that he had lost the election. She said Trump and Meadows were coming out of a meeting where they’d been discussing plans for Jan. 6 and she overheard Trump say, “There’s always that chance that we didn’t win, but I think tomorrow’s gonna go well.” ​​

Hutchinson also recalled multiple instances during that time period when, she said, Meadows told her that the president had privately admitted defeat, as well as conversations with the then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy, in which they relayed the same message. According to Hutchinson, both Ratcliffe and McCarthy had expressed concerns that Meadows was giving Trump “bad advice,” suggesting that the chief of staff may have been giving the president false hope that the election could still be overturned.

According to the report, Hutchinson and other witnesses also described actions or statements made by Trump during this period of time that indicated he was privately preparing to leave the White House.

Hutchinson, for example, told the committee in her September interview that by Dec. 30, 2020, Trump had begun demanding that his adult children receive Secret Service protection for one year after leaving the White House, double the sixth months of protection the Secret Service customarily provides to presidential children.

Key Trump administration officials, including Gen. Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who served as a national security adviser for Vice President Mike Pence, also told the committee about a memo that Trump signed in the immediate aftermath of the 2020 election, instructing the Department of Defense to withdraw all military forces from Somalia and Afghanistan before Biden’s inauguration, to be held on Jan. 20, 2021.

The select committee’s report also indicates that Milley, former White House aide Alyssa Farah Griffin, and former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway told the panel about additional statements made by Trump acknowledging that he’d lost the election. However, the transcripts of those interviews have not yet been made public.

Report: Trump and his allies knew their efforts were illegal

The committee uncovered evidence that Trump knew that his plan to replace the duly selected electors with pro-Trump “fake electors” and to have Pence unilaterally reject electoral votes cast in several states Trump lost was illegal. Although the plan was pushed heavily by lawyer and Trump loyalist John Eastman, Pence ultimately refused.

Trump, the report said, “knew that Vice President Pence could not lawfully refuse to count legitimate votes. Despite all of these facts, President Trump nevertheless proceeded to instruct Vice President Pence to execute a plan he already knew was illegal,” the report said.

Eastman was also aware that the strategy was unlawful, according to the panel's report, which states that he was warned repeatedly that his plan was “completely crazy,” and cites an email exchange involving Eastman.

“When the Vice President’s counsel wrote to Eastman on January 6th to ask whether the latter had informed the President that the Vice President did not have authority to decide the election unilaterally,” the report states, “Eastman responded: ‘He’s been so advised,’ and added, “[b]ut you know him—once he gets something in his head, it is hard to get him to change course.’”

According to his testimony at one of the committee's public hearings in June, former Pence counsel Greg Jacob testified that at a meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 4, Eastman acknowledged in Trump’s presence that his proposal would “violate several provisions of the Electoral Count Act,” but he rationalized that it could still be carried out because “in his view, the Electoral Count Act was unconstitutional,” Jacob said.

Potential witness tampering during the panel’s investigation

In addition to the official criminal referrals, the select committee’s report also discusses evidence it obtained suggesting potential efforts to obstruct their investigation, much of which the committee said it has already shared with the DOJ and the Fulton County district attorney.

Specifically, the report highlights a number of revelations made by Hutchinson in her September interview, regarding guidance she’d received from a Trump-aligned attorney during her earlier dealings with the select committee.

Hutchinson said she’d been connected to the attorney, Stefan Passantino, who previously served as top ethics counsel in the Trump White House, through another former colleague after receiving a subpoena from the select committee last fall. Hutchinson said that Passantino initially refused to tell her who was paying for him to represent her, but later let slip that her legal fees were being funded by a Trump-aligned political action committee.

Though she could not afford to pay for an attorney on her own, Hutchinson said she was worried about being provided a lawyer from “Trump world” because, as she told the committee, “once you are looped in, especially financially with them, there sort of is no turning back.”

Ahead of her first deposition before the committee, Hutchinson said Passantino discouraged her from trying to prepare by reading old news stories or reviewing her calendar from the weeks before Jan. 6, telling her, “The less you remember, the better.”

Though she insists she was never told to lie to the committee, Hutchinson said Passantino encouraged her to “downplay your role,” in the White House and to not proactively bring up information to the committee that could cast the president in a bad light.

“They don’t know what you know,” Hutchinson said Passantino told her, referring to the committee. “They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don't recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this.”

Hutchinson said Passantino made clear that he was sharing details from her testimony with other attorneys for witnesses also being called to testify before the committee, even when she asked him not to. She also said was promised potential jobs from other Trump associates, which were withdrawn once details of her testimony began circulating in the press, and testified that multiple people with ties to the former president contacted her before her meetings with the select committee to remind her to remain “loyal.”

“I felt like I had Trump looking over my shoulder,” Hutchinson told the committee. “That scared me.”

Hutchinson described how she grew increasingly uncomfortable with the legal advice she was receiving from Passantinto, but said she finally decided to find a new lawyer after he encouraged her to risk being held in contempt by refusing to testify before the committee a third time.

Passantino denied advising Hutchinson to mislead the committee in a statement to CNN, saying “I represented Ms. Hutchinson honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me. I believed Ms. Hutchinson was being truthful and cooperative with the Committee throughout the several interview sessions in which I represented her.”

The report suggests that Hutchinson isn’t the only witness whose testimony may have been influenced by conflicting interests, and even states that “the Select Committee is aware of multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses,” though it doesn’t specify which witnesses or provide any other details about the attempted contact.

The committee seems to raise questions about possible efforts to influence the testimony of Secret Service agents, pointing out that “a small number of Secret Service agents engaged private counsel for their interviews before the Committee” rather than rely on free legal representation from the agency’s lawyers, as another example of potential obstruction.

The report notes that some witnesses, including former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and Trump’s daughter Ivanka, weren’t “entirely frank or forthcoming,” and suggests that White House staffer Anthony Ornato may have given the committee “testimony consistent with the false account” in a book written by Meadows, downplaying Trump’s desire to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The committee indicated that it will be releasing additional transcripts that will allow the public to compare the different witness accounts, as well as attorney conduct, to “ultimately make its own assessment of these issues.”