A year later, after an impeachment and amid federal investigations, the risk to America’s system of governance remains high, according to many elected officials and advocates.Įtched in the granite of national memory, Jan.
6 Capitol riot, but the explosion of political violence exposed the republic’s fragility. On Thursday, the panel released transcripts of two closed-door interviews with former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified in person at one of the televised hearings over the summer and described in vivid detail Trump’s actions and inaction inside the White House.WASHINGTON - America survived the Jan. The committee has also begun to release hundreds of transcripts of its interviews. While the criminal referrals have no legal standing, they are a final statement from the committee after its extensive, year-and-a-half-long probe. On Monday, the panel officially passed their investigation to the Justice Department, recommending the department investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection. Other Democratic-led probes investigated his finances, his businesses, his foreign ties and his family. He was acquitted by the Senate both times. Democrats impeached Trump twice, the second time a week after the insurrection. The investigation’s release is a final act for House Democrats who are ceding power to Republicans in less than two weeks, and have spent much of their four years in power investigating Trump. “Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” Hicks texted another colleague that evening. tweet - just as the rioters were first breaking into the Capitol - that Vice President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” The report says “virtually everyone on the White House staff” interviewed by the committee condemned Trump’s 2:24 p.m. “We all look like domestic terrorists now,” longtime aide Hope Hicks texted Julie Radford, who served as Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, in the aftermath. Inside the White House, dozens of staffers and associates pleaded with Trump to make a forceful statement. “He willfully remained idle even as others, including his own Vice President, acted.”ĭuring those hours, Pence huddled and hid in the Capitol, begging security officials for a quicker National Guard response as rioters outside called for his hanging because he would not illegally try to thwart Biden’s win as Congress was counting the votes. That inaction was a “dereliction of duty,” the report says, noting that Trump had more power than any other person as the nation’s commander-in-chief. In total, 187 minutes elapsed between the time Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse and his first effort to get the rioters to disperse, through an eventual video message hours later in which he asked his supporters to go home even as he reassured them, “We love you, you’re very special.” “By that time, if not sooner, he had been made aware of the violent riot,” the report states. The report details Trump’s inaction as his loyalists were storming the building, detailing the hours when he watched the violence on television but did nothing to stop it.Ī White House photographer snapped a picture of Trump at 1:21 p.m., learning of the early violence from an employee upon returning to the White House after his speech - after his own security officials had rebuffed his efforts to go to the Capitol himself. “But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.” “Donald Trump lit that fire,” Thompson writes. “The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” Thompson wrote. “The failure to sufficiently share and act upon that intelligence jeopardized the lives of the police officers defending the Capitol and everyone in it,” the report says.Īt the same time, the committee makes an emphatic point that security failures are not the primary cause for the insurrection.
The report details a multitude of failings by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, noting that many of the rioters came with weapons and had openly planned for violence online before they overwhelmed underprepared law enforcement. 6 that his supporters should protest “peacefully and patriotically.” The committee did include that statement, noting that he followed it with election falsehoods and charged language exhorting the crowd to “fight like hell.” Posting on his social media site, Trump called the report “highly partisan” and falsely claimed it didn’t include his statement on Jan.
Trump “is unfit for any office,” writes the committee’s vice chairwoman, Republican Rep.
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