The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on Capitol Hill will focus its attention this week on efforts by former President Trump and his allies to pressure state election officials to overturn the results of the 2020 election to your favour.
The committee’s public hearings so far this month have focused on a specific angle aimed at building a case that Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6 insurrection on Capitol Hill that included his intense pressure campaign on the former vice president. Mike Pence to reject the Electoral College. votes from certain states that Trump lost, costing him the election.
“A pressure campaign, as we saw last week, on the vice president to ignore the Constitution put the vice president’s life in danger,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the Jan. 6 panel, said Sunday. on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“This week we will hear how a similar pressure campaign directed against state and local election officials put their lives in danger,” he continued.
Schiff said the committee has evidence that Trump himself was involved in the effort, but when pressed, he declined to say whether Trump led the efforts.
“We will show during a hearing what the president’s role was in trying to get states to appoint alternate lists of voters, how that plan initially depended on the hope that legislatures would come together again and bless him,” he said.
The committee has not yet announced its witnesses for Tuesday’s hearing, which begins at 1 p.m.
People in seven states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) reportedly tried to send alternate electors to cast Electoral College votes for Trump. The committee has cited a variety of people involved in those efforts.
A proposal circulated by Trump campaign lawyer John Eastman before Jan. 6 suggested that Pence could avoid counting the Electoral College votes of those states that submitted multiple lists of voters, which could send the matter back to legislatures. state.
Last week, the committee sent a letter seeking testimony from Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, after the panel learned that she had emailed Eastman and 29 Arizona state lawmakers to help. to reverse Biden’s victory there.
“We will show the brave state officials who stood up and said they would not go along with this plan to call legislatures back into session or decertify Joe Biden’s results,” Schiff said on CNN. “The system was maintained because many state and local election officials kept their oath to the Constitution.”
Some of Trump’s efforts to pressure state officials are widely documented.
In a now-infamous January 2021 phone call, Trump suggested to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (right) that he could “find” enough votes to reverse Biden’s victory in the state, but Raffensperger refused to do so. .
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), another member of the Jan. 6 panel, said similarly on ABC’s “This Week” that the committee believes Trump was personally aware of the campaign to pressure states.
“We’re going to have a discussion on Tuesday about state pressure,” Kinzinger said. “And so you can see where the president knew all of that. I think we can show it to the American people.”
The panel had postponed one of its hearings last week that was expected to detail yet another pressure campaign by Trump to get the Department of Justice (DOJ) to back up his baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Kinzinger said Sunday that the committee’s second hearing this week scheduled for Thursday will focus on the department.
Court records presented by the panel from January 6 in March revealed details of a meeting on January 3, 2021 in which Trump considered firing Justice Department leaders who would not pursue an investigation into claims of voter fraud. .
Trump sought to install mid-level Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark, one of his allies, as acting attorney general to push through an investigation, but opted against it after being warned of mass resignations from the department if he went ahead.
Reference-thehill.com