January 6 Committee takeaways

Admin former White House officials, White House aide Sarah Matthews, Roger Stone declare victory, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, can vice president overturn election, letter written by Jeffrey Clark, irregularities in the 20200 election, most secure election in history

On July 21, the committee heard testimony from former White House officials who said Trump was unmoved for hours by the many pleas from aides, lawmakers, friends and family members to intervene during the Capitol attack. Two White House aides, Sarah Matthews and Matthew Pottinger, said that they argued with colleagues and Trump that he should condemn the violence. White House counsel Pat Cipollone told the committee that Trump was alone in refusing to take action to send the rioters home.

Testimony and documents show that Donald Trump and his allies had plans to contest the election before it even happened. They planned to use voter fraud as their excuse. Conservative activist Tom Fitton had drafted a memo on Oct. 31, 2020, saying that Trump won the election. Video clips from a documentary by Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen has Trump adviser Roger Stone advocating for declaring victory and preparing for violence ahead of the election. President Trump falsely declared victory on election night.

The committee played segments of a phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, in which President Trump asked him to “find” the 11,780 votes he needed to defeat Joe Biden.

Republican Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers said Trump called him in late December 2020 asking him to interfere in the Electoral College process. Trump’s legal counsel, John Eastman also urged Bowers to “just do it and let the courts sort it out.”

Recorded testimony from Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), implicated Trump in the fake-electors scheme.

Senior Justice Department officials testified to Trump’s effort to misuse the Justice Department as part of his plan to hold on to power. He demanded that the department investigate baseless claims of election fraud. The Justice Department was asked to help legitimize the stolen election lies and to basically call the election corrupt, appoint a special counsel to investigate alleged election fraud, and to send a letter to six state legislatures urging them to consider altering the election results.

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputies told the former president that their investigations had failed to unearth meaningful evidence of fraud. In response Trump implored the DOJ to simply rubber-stamp his claims and “leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

A draft letter written by Jeffrey Clark with another Department of Justice lawyer, Ken Klukowski, was to be sent to the leadership of the Georgia state legislature. Other versions of the letter were intended for other states. It was to be written on official Department of Justice letterhead. The letter began “The Department of Justice is investigating various irregularities in the 20200 election for President of the United States.” The letter urged Georgia state officials to choose an alternate set of electors. When DOJ’s top officials refused to support claims of fraud Trump discussed replacing Rosen with Clark so the letters would be sent. It was the threat of mass resignations in the DOJ that convinced Trump not to go forward.

Then Attorney General William Barr told Trump there was no evidence of fraud and the Homeland Security Department said the 2020 vote was the “most secure election in history.”

For weeks Trump pressured Vice President Mike Pence to take action to overturn the election. Trump had declared both in public and in private that Pence should use his position to overturn the election results in swing states and declare Trump the winner of the election. Pence insisted that the United States Constitution did not give him that power but Trump insisted he do so. Multiple sources say that Trump called Pence before he departed to certify the results urging him again one last time. Trump reportedly told him, “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.” L. Lin Wood, a lawyer associated with Trump, called for Pence to be “executed” by “firing squad.”

“The vast weight of evidence presented so far has shown us that the central cause of Jan. 6 was one man: Donald Trump, who many others followed,” Cheney said. “None of this would have happened without him, he was personally and substantially involved in all of it.”
– Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming

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