It was also a temptation for the American people to attend the next five scheduled hearings. Here are some conclusions:
Trump was at the center of the plot.
The committee’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, and Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming, began outlining what they described as Mr. Trump’s elaborate, deliberate plan to stay in power for a while. history and with dangerous consequences for democracy. «Jan. “6 was the culmination of a coup attempt,” said Mr Thompson. Both leaders had scathing words about Mr. Trump and the threat he posed to American democracy. They made it clear that, despite his continuing fuss over stolen elections, Mr. Trump had knowingly spread allegations of electoral fraud that those closest to him knew to be false, and tried to use the government mechanism and the courts to cling to him. then, when all else fails, sat in the White House applauding as a mob of supporters stormed the Capitol threatening to hang his vice president.
Leading figures around Trump never believed his lie about stolen elections.
The hearing used the videotaped testimony of some of Trump’s closest aides and allies to show that Trump’s campaign and his White House — and perhaps the president himself — were well aware that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the election. showed how Mr. Trump and his entourage had used a calculated campaign of lies to bind his followers and build support in his quest to stay in power, through legal means and violence. The commission played excerpts from videotaped interviews with former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said he had told Mr. Trump that the talk of widespread fraud in the 2020 election was “bullshit.” There was a video of his daughter, Ivanka Trump, saying she accepted the conclusions of Mr Barr and campaign lawyer Alex Cannon, who told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows that Trump’s allies did not win the election. issues that could overturn it leading to key situations. “So it’s not there?” Mr Meadows responded, according to Mr Cannon. At one point, in one of the most potentially devastating moments of videotaped interviews, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kouchner appears to dismiss threats by Pat A. Cipollone, then a White House adviser, to step down in the face of his machinations. as “whining”.
A Capitol policeman who fought the rioters humanizes the drama.
Caroline Edwards, a Capitol police officer believed to be the first to be injured during the uprising, testified in gruesome detail about the first breach of police lines, during which she was crushed under bicycle racks that pushed her and a handful of other officers who they had no chance of holding the mob. “The back of my head cut the concrete stairs behind me,” she testified, recounting the moment before she lost consciousness. Her testimony that she continued to fight the rioters in their efforts to protect the Capitol gave a striking contrast to the committee’s account of Trump sitting in the White House and watching with obvious sympathy as the mob looted the building, shouting for help. who begged him to end the violence and saying at one point, “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” As soon as she came and saw the scene behind the police lines, said Officer Edwards, she was out of breath. She slipped into blood, saw her fellow officers spinning in pain and suffering from bear spray and tear gas, and looked out of what she described as a war scene unfolding outside the Capitol. “It was a massacre,” he said. “It was a mess. I can not even describe what I saw. “
The Proud Boys made an organized effort.
One of the witnesses, a British documentary named Nick Quested, who was part of the extremist Proud Boys, testified that the group’s leadership had conspired with another extremist organization, the Oath Keepers, long before the uprising to plot an attack that would violate the Capitol. Mr Questedt showed plots that led Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio to secretly meet with Oath Keepers’ Stewart Rhodes on Jan. 5, and said the group walked away from a morning rally behind the White House in January. 6 to detect police defenses around the Capitol. “I am not allowed to say what is going to happen today because everyone should just watch it,” a woman said in a video on the morning of January 6, when no signs of an attack were visible.
There is more to the role of Trump and Republicans
The hearing ended with a hint of what was to follow at subsequent hearings, which hope committee members will show how Mr. Trump was personally responsible for the worst attack on the Capitol since the British looted it in 1814 and that it remains a threat to the American democratic experiment. The commission concluded with a video of the rioters themselves saying they believed they had been invited to Washington that day by their president, who had asked them to fight for him. “He lit the fuse that eventually led to the January 6 violence,” Thompson, chairman of the committee, said of Trump. Ms. Cheney, whose insistence on convicting Mr. Trump and her involvement in the investigation has made her an outcast in her own party, said the commission’s case would indelibly hurt Republicans. “I say this tonight to my Republican colleagues who are defending the defenseless,” he said. “The day will come when Donald Trump will leave, but your dishonesty will remain.”
