U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday accused then-President Donald Trump of iinciting a mob of supporters to attack the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a last attempt to stay in power while Congress formally certified his electoral defeat.
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Members of a House select committee investigating the attack said Trump was told by his administration and campaign advisers that he had lost the 2020 presidential election and should acknowledge Joe Biden’s victory, but that he decided to ignore the advice.
Witnesses in a video described a tense six-hour meeting in December 2020 in which Trump ignored the advice and sided with outside advisers who urged him to keep insisting in his baseless claims of electoral fraud.
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Trump was ultimately responsible for the chaos that followed, lawmakers said.
“President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. … He is responsible for his own actions and his own decisions,” said Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, vice chair of the commission.
Trump is a 76-year-old man, not an impressionable child
“The strategy has been to blame what Donald Trump did on what his advisers called ‘crazy people. This, of course, doesn’t make sense,” Cheney said.
Committee members said Trump incited the revolt with his refusal to admit that he lost the election and with calls on Twitter on December 19, 2020 for his supporters to come to Washington for a “big protest”, saying: “Be there, it will be crazy”.
The seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee have used the hearings to build a case that Trump’s efforts to overturn his loss in the November 2020 election constitute illegal conduct, outside the norm of politics.
Trump, a Republican who has hinted he could run for the White House again in 2024, denies any wrongdoing and has falsely claimed he only lost because of widespread fraud benefiting Biden, a Democrat.
the audience too was going to analyze the links between right-wing militant groups, including the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys and the QAnon internet conspiracy movement, Trump and his allies.
The hearing featured video testimony from Pat Cipollone, a former Trump White House adviser, who spoke with committee investigators for eight hours behind closed doors on Friday.
Cipollone said he had urged Trump to concede defeat.
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The committee played taped testimony from Cipollone and others in the Trump administration describing an angry Dec. 18 meeting in which a handful of Trump’s outside advisers, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, encouraged him to challenge the election result.
The attack on Capitol Hill, following Trump’s speech at a rally outside the White House, delayed the certification of Joe Biden’s election for hours, injured more than 140 police officers and caused several deaths.
Trump’s defense
Cheney, one of the two Republicans who are part of the committee and who is opposed to the former president, dismantled Trump’s defense strategy that he was manipulated to ignore his closest advisers and believe that there was electoral fraud.
In his opinion, “no man in his right mind” could ignore that information and reach the opposite conclusion.
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The legislator considered that the assumption that he was manipulated seeks to show that he was unable to discern “between good and evil” and blame his closest collaborators, but it is not supported by the evidence collected to date.
When he wrote on Twitter “Be present, it will be wild!”, it is “clear” that he wanted to encourage the masses to come to Capitol Hill with the aim of trying to pursue a second term in power, according to Democratic congressman Jamie Raskin.
REUTERS and Efe
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