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The much-anticipated Thursday launch of the report from the choose committee to research the January 6 assault, together with a variety of accompanying depositions, gave us extra perception into the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election that culminated within the assault on the Capitol.
The report is sprawling, with over 800 pages and dozens of connected interview transcripts, which you could find right here. Even although a lot of what was in it was revealed throughout the 10 televised hearings the committee held over the summer season and fall, there may be lots within the report that’s public for the primary time.
Here are a number of the most fascinating takeaways, revelations, and suggestions from the report and the accompanying depositions.
1) The extent of the hassle to overturn the election
The committee laid out simply how a lot effort Trump and his allies put into schemes to persuade state and native officers to overturn the election. According to the report, “between the November election and the January 6th insurrection, President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation.”
This tally doesn’t depend different efforts by Trump marketing campaign staffers to contact state legislators, which included efforts to contact 190 Republican elected officers simply in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan. The Trump marketing campaign additionally placed on a full-scale whip operation to arrange its efforts to pick faux electors and guarantee they convened on December 14, when the Electoral College met, so they might have an alternate avenue to problem the election outcomes.
For a way of how invested the previous president personally was in his efforts, Trump tried to talk with Brad Raffensperger “at least 18 times” earlier than that notorious January 2 telephone name the place he requested the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.”
2) Extremists had been integral to January 6
The report makes clear that the political fringes had been instrumental at nearly each step main as much as — and through — the assault on the Capitol. Members of the Proud Boys had been within the vanguard of the assault and breached police fencing earlier than Trump even completed talking, making certain that the total crowd strolling from the Ellipse right down to the Capitol can be near the constructing by the point they arrived.
It additionally exhibits that key figures on the fitting thought the march to the Capitol was a central a part of the plan. Ali Alexander, a far-right activist and organizer of the rally that day, believed that the White House needed him to march to the Capitol. Alt-right media character Alex Jones even requested Caroline Wren, a outstanding Republican fundraiser who helped set up the rally, when he ought to go away Trump’s speech and start the march, in response to Wren’s testimony. Many of those figures linked in a Signal chat known as “Friends of Stone,” named after longtime Trump ally Roger Stone. It included Stone, Alexander, Proud Boys chief Enrique Tarrio, and Oath Keepers chief Stewart Rhodes.
3) The push to overturn the election began straight away
Within days of Trump’s loss, prime allies already had been encouraging him to attempt to overturn the consequence. It wasn’t simply former White House chief of workers Mark Meadows who was batting round concepts about easy methods to overturn the election ends in textual content messages.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich despatched Trump’s assistant a message on November 10, two days after visiting him on the White House, the place he instructed Trump urge “GOP legislatures elect not to send in electors” with a purpose to someway throw the election to the House on January 6. Cleta Mitchell, a longtime Republican election lawyer, emailed Trump lawyer John Eastman on November 5 to draft a memo on how state legislatures may “reclaim electors.”
Vince Haley, a White House speechwriter, didn’t even recommend that claiming election fraud was a mandatory fig leaf, and argued that state legislatures “have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents” as a result of “Harrisburg [Pennsylvania], Madison [Wisconsin], and Lansing [Michigan] do not have to sit idly by and submit themselves to rule by Beijing and Paris.”
4) Trump didn’t take Sidney Powell significantly
Although the previous president has propounded lots of the conspiracy theories that conservative legal professional Sidney Powell touted about Dominion voting machines and mass election fraud throughout the 2020 election, he at the very least initially didn’t take them significantly. The day after her notorious press convention on the RNC headquarters — the place she fingered the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez as one of many key election fraud masterminds whereas Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye dripped off of his head — Powell was on a convention name with Trump. During the decision, the previous president put her on mute and laughed at her, including to others within the room that “this does sound crazy.”
5) Cassidy Hutchinson’s lawyer was representing “Trump World,” not her
In a September deposition earlier than the committee, Cassidy Hutchinson, the previous Trump aide who gave explosive testimony in a televised June committee listening to, made clear that her authentic lawyer was solely attempting to guard Trump. Hutchinson finally switched attorneys earlier than her testimony, and particulars had trickled out about how Trump World had been pressuring her prematurely of her look earlier than the committee, however her deposition supplies the primary full accounting of this.
Hutchinson describes how she was linked with Stefan Passantino, the previous Trump White House ethics lawyer, to signify her professional bono after the committee initially subpoenaed her. Passantino encouraged her to keep away from answering questions at each potential flip by saying, “I don’t recall.”
He additionally made clear to her, “We just want to focus on protecting the President. We all know you’re loyal,” and prevented telling her who was truly paying for her authorized illustration. Eventually, he slipped that it was “Trump World.” In the meantime, Passantino was aiding in efforts to seek out Hutchinson a job by working his connections round Trump. Eventually, Hutchinson fired him when he suggested her to threat being held in contempt by the committee somewhat than adjust to their requests.
6) Trump and his allies ought to endure constitutional penalties
In its suggestions, the committee says Trump and his allies must be completely barred from holding authorities workplace beneath Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which prohibits anybody who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against” the United States from holding any “civil or military” workplace if they’ve beforehand taken a proper oath to assist the US Constitution.
In the phrases of the report, “the Committee believes that those who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and then, on January 6th, engaged in insurrection can appropriately be disqualified and barred from holding government office — whether federal or state, civilian or military.”
It goes on to advocate that Congress move laws on this subject to determine particular procedures for formal disqualification.
