Jan. 6 report comes down on Trump
Panel’s final findings provide a road map for recommended criminal charges.
The long-anticipated, 845-page report of eight chapters from the House select committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection provides a road map for potential criminal charges against Trump and others.
Written in a narrative style, rather than the dry, bureaucratic tone that characterizes most investigative reports of this magnitude, the document elaborates on the story the committee laid out in its televised hearings earlier this year, detailing “a multipart plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election” and blaming the insurrection ultimately on “one man.”
The committee voted Monday to refer its findings to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. The panel recommended four federal charges against Trump, including one on assisting, aiding or comforting those involved in an insurrection.
The Justice Department is conducting its own investigation into the Jan. 6 attack, which left five people dead.
“As you read this report, please consider this: Vice President Pence, along with many of the appointed officials who surrounded Donald Trump, worked to defeat many of the worst parts of Trump’s plan to overturn the election,” committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) wrote in the foreword to the report. “This was not a certainty. It is comforting to assume that the institutions of our Republic will always withstand those who try to defeat our Constitution from within. But our institutions are only strong when those who hold office are faithful to our Constitution.”
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump responded that the committee had intentionally misconstrued what happened. He falsely blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) for the violence on Jan. 6.
“The highly partisan Unselect Committee Report purposely fails to mention the failure of Pelosi to heed my recommendation for troops to be used in D.C., show the ‘Peacefully and Patrioticly’ words I used, or study the reason for the protest, Election Fraud. WITCH HUNT!” he said.
The report begins by describing the weeks leading up to the election and detailing evidence that Trump intended to declare victory on election night regardless of what the results showed.
Stephen K. Bannon, who had served as Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, previewed that plan on Oct. 31, 2020, telling a private audience that Trump would take advantage of the way Americans vote to “declare himself a winner.” More Democrats vote by mail than Republicans, all but ensuring that Trump would appear to lead before all the votes were tallied.
The report also documents Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden, detailing court cases, appeals to state lawmakers to throw out vote tallies and a campaign to pressure Department of Justice officials to declare, without evidence, that the election was being stolen.
It lays out how Trump and his legal team badgered Vice President Mike Pence with the incorrect theory that he had the power to reject states’ electoral votes. It explains that Pence rejected that theory, reasoning that the Founding Fathers would not have given one politician the power to overturn a national election.
Like the committee’s series of hearings, the report concludes by describing Trump summoning thousands of supporters to Washington and then spending 187 minutes sitting in a White House dining room, watching as a mob stormed the Capitol while he ignored the family members, aides, Republican politicians and media figures who urged him to intervene.
As the crisis unfolded, Trump continued to tweet, but rebuffed calls to calm the violence. Three hours after the attack had begun, Trump finally made a statement on camera telling the crowd to leave.
“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 Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote in the foreword.
The 18-month investigation collected more than 1,000 depositions, including from many of Trump’s top aides, Cabinet officials and family members, as well as more than 1 million documents.
Thompson said Monday that the bulk of the nonsensitive material compiled by the panel would be made public before the end of the year. Thompson did not say how many documents would be released or what would be deemed sensitive.
The report, which is expected to mark the final act of the bipartisan committee, includes a list of 11 recommendations, including changes to Capitol Police oversight; new protections for election workers; and officially declaring the riot an insurrection so those who participated will be barred from holding office under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
The panel has already endorsed overhauling the Electoral Count Act, the law that Trump and his allies tried to exploit in an attempt to cling to power. The House is scheduled to give final approval to that overhaul on Friday.
The document also includes four appendices on topics including the funding behind Trump’s Jan. 6 rally and the intelligence failures that allowed the attack to occur.
Republicans, who take control of the House on Jan. 3, have said they don’t plan to continue the committee’s work. In fact, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield), the front-runner to become the next speaker, said Republicans may investigate the workings of the Jan. 6 committee itself.
That left the Jan. 6 panel racing to make its report and potentially millions of pages of underlying evidence public in less than two weeks.
That time crunch can be seen throughout the final report, which was released late Thursday. It includes, for example, a reference to the Federal Bureau of Intelligence rather than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. But the report nevertheless offers the most comprehensive summary to date of the facts surrounding what led to the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
The report loosely touches on the failures of intelligence and law enforcement agencies — which generally missed or ignored signs that extremist groups had taken a Dec. 19 tweet from Trump inviting them to Washington on Jan. 6 as a call to organize and prepare for violence. Getting to the root of those intelligence failures was among the primary responsibilities given to the committee when it was created by the House.
The committee blames the hours-long delay before National Guard troops arrived at the Capitol in part on senior military leaders’ wariness about involving the military in quelling domestic protests.
“Trump’s eagerness to engage the US military to play a visible role in addressing domestic unrest during the late spring and summer of 2020 does appear to have prompted senior military leadership to take precautions, in preparing for the joint session,” the report states. “While the delay seems unnecessary and unacceptable, it was the byproduct of military processes, institutional caution, and a revised deployment approval process.”
Earlier Thursday, the committee released the latest in a series of over three dozen transcripts of its interviews. The revelations in those documents included details of an apparent pressure campaign on one of the committee's key witnesses, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.
Stefan Passantino, the Trump-aligned lawyer who initially represented Hutchinson, instructed her to downplay her knowledge of what happened during the insurrection, Hutchinson told the committee in two days of depositions in September.
Passantino would not tell her who was paying for his legal services, she told the committee, and she soon became leery, suspecting he was more concerned about Trump and other high-ranking former White House officials than he was about her.
“‘I am completely indebted to these people,’” she recalled telling her mother. “I was like, ‘And they will ruin my life, Mom, if I do anything that they don’t want me to do.’”
In a statement first reported by CNN, Passantino said he represented Hutchinson, as he had other clients, “honorably, ethically, and fully consistent with her sole interests as she communicated them to me.”
Hutchinson parted ways with Passantino after she made several spring 2021 appearances before the committee in which she felt she was giving untruthful or incomplete answers, she said. After switching attorneys, she provided some of the most dramatic live testimony of the panel’s nine hearings this year.
Also released Thursday were transcripts of the committee’s interviews with Chris Krebs, former director of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; convicted Jan. 6 rioter Stephen Ayres; former Defense Secretary Mark Esper; Justice Department employee Ken Klukowski; and Sarah Matthews, a former deputy White House press secretary who detailed Trump's efforts to convince the White House press team to repeat election-related conspiracy theories.
