Donald Trump acted “illegally” and was the engine of a coup attempt in the United States on January 6, 2021, when a mob of his followers forced their way into the Capitol and sowed chaos for hours. with a balance of five dead. It is the main conclusion of the Congressional Committee that is investigating what happened a year and a half ago. The panel, made up of Democratic and Republican congressmen, presented a barrage of testimony to support its main premise: that the former president deliberately lied by insisting that it was he who won the 2020 elections and not Joe Biden.
“Donald Trump had days in court to dispute the outcome of the election, but he lost in court as well as at the polls,” said Bennie Thompson, a Democratic congresswoman and chair of the special committee. What happened on January 6 was part of “a conspiracy to try to eliminate the votes of millions of Americans and replace the will of the American people with their own to remain in power.”
Thompson claimed that the former president was “at the center of this conspiracy” and instigated the angry masses who attacked the Capitol with his continuous lies, described as “bullshit” and “bullshit” by the US Attorney General at the time, William Barr, and ratified by Trump’s own daughter, Melania, in one of the many videos presented to demonstrate how a part of his government team – starting with Vice President Mike Pence – family members and even Republican senators turned their backs on him in his attempt to perpetuate himself in power despite his defeat at the polls.
For the congressman from Mississippi, “it was the culmination of a coup attempt”, the “most desperate way to cling to power”, a statement seconded by Republican Liz Cheney, vice president of the investigative Committee, who indicated that Trump not only “He did not condemn the attack but justified it.”
For Cheney there is no debate. The assault on the federal building was motivated by Trump’s lies in claiming “that the elections had been stolen from him and that he was the legitimate president.” The president refused to end the violence and “stoked the fire” of the attack, a fact that he described as a crime for trying to “destroy” the US government and a moment of “maximum danger” for the American republic.
According to the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, Trump “coordinated a sophisticated plan” to unseat the president, despite knowing that “he had lost the election.” Behind the January 6 attack was “a massive effort to distribute false information” and convince his supporters that electoral fraud had been committed.
It is only the beginning of a series of hearings over the coming weeks in which various witnesses will demonstrate how Trump tried to attack democracy in the US and how he had prior information about the violence that could occur in Washington, without doing anything to prevent it. Even members of his family “begged” him to act but the president ignored them. Neither he nor he contacted his Secretary of Defense or the Department of Justice to nip the insurrection in the bud. He just sent a video in which he declared his love for his followers and told them how special they are.
The first part of the session closed with a compilation of images on the advance of the mob towards the Capitol and the moments of tension and violence recorded in Washington, the first bars of a long investigation that could deal a final blow to the political career of Donald Trump.
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