Drew Angerer; Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Democratic U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland says that former President Donald Trump‘s role in the January 6 insurrection extends beyond “merely inciting” the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Raskin, of the January 6 House committee, said during an MSNBC interview on Monday that in addition to being “clearly” guilty of “incitement to insurrection,” the former president “put the whole plan together.” He said the committee’s work had built on evidence presented during Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial and had shown that the former president was a “far more central” figure in last year’s siege on the Capitol.
“Everything that took place during the impeachment trial was based on public statements and public records … for example, Donald Trump’s speech inciting the crowd to go ‘fight like hell, or you won’t have a country anymore,'” Raskin told host Nicolle Wallace. “All of that clearly added up to incitement to insurrection, as was found by bicameral majorities in both the House and in the Senate.”
“What we’ve been able to do on the January 6th select committee is to interview more than 1,000 witnesses, collect more than a million pages worth of documents and all of the details documenting that Donald Trump’s role was far more central to these events than merely inciting them. He was really behind them, and none of them would have happened without him.”
Raskin recalled that Trump had tweeted a plea for his supporters to gather in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, just as Congress was meeting for a joint session to certify President Joe Biden‘s 2020 election victory.
January 6 select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson said last week that the panel would be doing at least “some” criminal referrals to the Department of Justice in the coming weeks.
Some experts believe that the committee has been gathering evidence that could be used in a “multi-prong criminal case” against Trump.
Raskin said during his interview on Monday that the committee’s final report would show “in striking detail” that Trump was responsible for multiple crimes, while stressing that he would not go into “specifics” about any “particular defendants.”
“We’re going to be able to show in a lot of more vivid and striking detail in our report precisely how Donald Trump put the whole plan together,” Raskin said.
“Yes, this was clearly an attempt to interfere with a federal proceeding, but it was a lot of other things too,” he added. “It was an attempt to overthrow an election, to defraud the public … it was an effort to shut down the U.S. government.”
In addition to Trump, reports have suggested that the former president’s associates such as Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and Jeffrey Clark could face prosecution based on the committee’s recommendations.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s office for comment.
