Former US President Donald Trump
(Picture: REUTERS)Donald Trump engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn his 2020 election defeat, according to the final report of the January 6 committee.
The former president “provoked his supporters to violence” at the Capitol with false claims of widespread voter fraud, says the 814-page report.
The 6 January 2021 insurrection of Mr Trump’s followers threatened democracy with “horrific” brutality towards law enforcement and “put the lives of American lawmakers at risk”, according to the report’s executive summary.
“The central cause of January 6 was one man, former president Donald Trump, who many others followed,” reads the report from the House January 6 committee, which was released in full on Thursday.
"None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him."
The committee released 34 transcripts from the 1,000 interviews it conducted over the past 18 months. Most of those released are of witnesses who invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
The report’s eight chapters of findings largely mirror nine hearings this year that presented evidence from the private interviews and millions of pages of documents.
They tell the story of Mr Trump’s extraordinary and unprecedented campaign to overturn his defeat and his pressure campaign on state officials, the Justice Department, members of Congress and his own vice president to change the vote.
In the two months between the election and the insurrection, the report says, “President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election results.”
In a series of policy recommendations, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee suggest that Trump should be barred from future office, noting that the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution holds that anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution can be prevented from holding office for engaging in insurrection or rebellion.
“He is unfit for any office,” writes the committee’s vice chairwoman, Republican Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
Posting on his social media site, Trump called the report “highly partisan” and falsely claimed it didn’t include his statement on January 6 that his supporters should protest “peacefully and patriotically.”
The committee did include that statement, though, and noted that he followed that comment with election falsehoods and charged language exhorting the crowd to “fight like hell.”
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. “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.
At the same time, the committee makes an emphatic point that security failures are not the primary cause for the insurrection.
“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,” the report says.
“Donald Trump lit that fire,” it adds. “But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.”
It also says how he told them to "fight like hell" at a huge rally in front of the White House that morning and then did little to stop the violence as they beat police, broke into the Capitol and sent lawmakers running for their lives.
It was a "multi-part conspiracy," the committee concludes.
The massive, damning report comes as Mr Trump is running again for the presidency and also facing multiple federal investigations, including probes into his role in the insurrection and the presence of classified documents at his Florida estate.
A House committee is expected to release his tax returns in the coming days - documents that he has fought for years to keep private.
And he has been blamed by Republicans for a worse-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, leaving him in his most politically vulnerable state since he won the 2016 election.
