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.
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.”
More to come.
Dominic Patten
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