What’s in the Jan. 6 committee’s report summary
CNN
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The House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol has concluded that former President Donald Trump was ultimately responsible for the insurrection, laying out for the public and the Justice Department a trove of evidence for why he should be prosecuted for multiple crimes.
“That evidence has led to an overriding and straight-forward conclusion: the central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the committee writes in a summary of its final report released on Monday. “None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”
The summary describes in extensive detail how Trump tried to overpower, pressure and cajole anyone who wasn’t willing to help him overturn his election defeat – while knowing that many of his schemes were unlawful. His relentless arm-twisting included election administrators in key states, senior Justice Department leaders, state lawmakers, and others. The report even suggests possible witness tampering with the committee’s investigation.
The committee repeatedly uses forceful language to describe Trump’s intent: that he “purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud” in order to aid his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and to successfully solicit about $250 million in political contributions. “These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on January 6th.”
The full report, based on 1,000-plus interviews, documents collected including emails, texts, phone records and a year and a half of investigation by the nine-member bipartisan committee, will be released Wednesday, along with along with transcripts and other materials collected in the investigation.
Here’s what’s in the report summary:
The House committee lays out a number of criminal statutes it believes were violated in the plots to stave off Trump’s defeat and says there’s evidence for criminal referrals to the Justice Department for Trump, Trump attorney John Eastman and “others.”
The report summary says there’s evidence to pursue Trump on multiple crimes, including obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to make false statements, assisting or aiding an insurrection, conspiring to injure or impede an officer and seditious conspiracy.
The committee says it also has the evidence to refer Eastman on the obstruction charge, and it names him as a co-conspirator in other alleged criminal activity lawmakers have gathered evidence on.
In addition, several others are named as being participants in the conspiracies the committee is linking to Trump, including then-DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark and Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as Trump-tied lawyers Kenneth Chesebro and Rudy Giuliani.
The committee alluded to evidence of criminal obstruction of the House investigation but the summary does not go into detail about that evidence.
The committee outlines 17 findings from its investigation that underpin its reasoning for criminal referrals, including that Trump knew the fraud allegations he was pushing were false and continued to amplify them anyway.
“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated,” the summary states.
The committee revealed emails from Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, from before the 2020 presidential election that say Trump should declare victory regardless of the outcome.
It also notes that Trump’s top allies, including those who testified before the committee, acknowledged they found no proof to back up the former president’s claims.
“Ultimately, even Rudolph Giuliani and his legal team acknowledged that they had no definitive evidence of election fraud sufficient to change the election outcome,” the summary states, referring to Trump’s then-personal attorney.
“For example, although Giuliani repeatedly had claimed in public that Dominion voting machines stole the election, he admitted during his Select Committee deposition that ‘I do not think the machines stole the election,’” it states.
Sources familiar with Trump’s legal strategy in the Justice Department probe have told CNN that his attorneys believe prosecutors face an uphill battle in proving he did not believe the election was stolen despite being told as much by senior members of his own administration.
In making its case for a Justice Department prosecution of Trump, the House committee took aim at that possible defense.
“Even if it were true that President Trump genuinely believed the election was stolen, this is no defense,” the summary says. “No President can ignore the courts and purposely violate the law no matter what supposed ‘justification’ he or she presents.”
In describing why the committee believes Trump’s conduct meet the prongs of each criminal statute, the summary stresses evidence that Trump had been warned that his schemes were unlawful.
The committee says it gathered evidence indicating that Trump “raised roughly one quarter of a billion dollars in fundraising efforts between the election and January 6th. Those solicitations persistently claimed and referred to election fraud that did not exist.”
“For example, the Trump Campaign, along with the Republican National Committee, sent millions of emails to their supporters, with messaging claiming that the election was ‘rigged,’ that their donations could stop Democrats from ‘trying to steal the election,’ and that Vice President Biden would be an ‘illegitimate president’ if he took office,’” the summary states.
The select committee is referring several Republican lawmakers who refused to cooperate with the investigation to the House Ethics Committee.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, as well as Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona, could all face possible sanctions for their refusal to comply with committee subpoenas.
“If left unpunished, such behavior undermines Congress’s longstanding power to investigate in support of its lawmaking authority and suggests that Members of Congress may disregard legal obligations that apply to ordinary citizens,” the summary says.
The committee raised concerns that attorneys paid by Trump’s political committee or allied groups were incentivized to protect the former president, saying, “lawyers who are receiving such payments have specific incentives to defend President Trump rather than zealously represent their own clients. The Department of Justice and the Fulton County District Attorney have been provided with certain information related to this topic.”
In one instance, a witness whose lawyer was being paid by a Trump-allied group was told she could “in certain circumstances, tell the Committee that she did not recall facts when she actually did recall them.” When the witness raised concerns with her lawyer about that approach, the lawyer said, “They don’t know what you know, [witness]. They don’t know that you can recall some of these things. So you saying ‘I don’t recall’ is an entirely acceptable response to this,” according to the report summary.
When it came to a specific issue that reflected negatively on Trump, the lawyer told his client, “No, no, no, no, no. We don’t want to go there. We don’t want to talk about that.”
The committee notes both Trump and his allies attempted to contact witnesses ahead of their committee testimony.
“The Select Committee is aware of multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses. The Department of Justice is aware of at least one of those circumstances,” according to the summary.
The committee also, in its final report, highlighted two high-profile witnesses – Ivanka Trump and then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany – as being less cooperative than others. They and others “displayed a lack of full recollection of certain issues, or were not otherwise as frank or direct as Cipollone.”
In another instance, Trump had an angry conversation with Pence in which he referred to the then-vice president as “The P word,” according to a committee interview with Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff,…