WASHINGTON | What was Donald Trump’s responsibility in the attack on the US Congress on January 6, 2021? Did the former president’s maneuvers after the 2020 election amount to an attempted coup? After nearly a year of investigation, a parliamentary committee presents its first conclusions on Thursday.
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During these hearings, this group of elected officials with a Democratic majority promised “to provide the American people with a summary of its conclusions on the coordinated campaign intended to overturn the results of the presidential election of 2020 and to prevent the transfer of power” .
For nearly a year, the so-called “January 6” commission heard nearly 1,000 witnesses, including two children of the former president, to shed light on the actions of Donald Trump and his entourage.
She claims to have gone through more than 100,000 documents, and sent a hundred subpoenas to testify.
SMS and videos
SMS, official documents and supporting videos, a series of lawyers and key witnesses will present the different scenarios envisaged by Donald Trump and his entourage to reverse the course of the 2020 presidential election, until the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
On this cold winter day, under a sky laden with heavy clouds, thousands of supporters of Donald Trump gathered in Washington to denounce the result of the election which caused the Republican billionaire to lose.
After hearing the president invite them to “march to the Capitol”, a human tide had stormed the seat of the United States Congress, sending shock waves around the world.
A sign of the importance that the commission wants to bring to its investigation, the first hearing was organized at prime time: 8:00 p.m. local time (00:00 GMT Friday). It will be broadcast on many news channels continuously across the country.
Five other hearings, throughout the month of June, will complete this initial presentation.
«Explosives»
One of its members, Jamie Raskin, assured that these revelations would be “explosive”.
“No president has ever come this close to doing what happened here, in terms of trying to stage an insider coup to overthrow an election and bypass the Constitution,” he said. he recently told a panel at Georgetown University.
“But also to use a violent rebellion made up of violent extremist groups, white and racist supremacists, fascists, in order to support the coup”, detailed the elected Democrat.
A draft decree providing for the seizure of electoral machines, a rain of text messages sent to Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows… Some of the evidence in the hands of the parliamentary inquiry has already leaked in recent months.
The commission therefore faces a major challenge: that of constructing a gripping narrative, capable of capturing the attention of the general public and convincing it.
Because if the images of a man with buffalo horns strolling in the corridors of this white marble building are still vivid, opinion polls place this investigation very low in the list of concerns of American households, far behind inflation. or the price of gasoline.
Another problem, more than a year and a half after the 2020 presidential election, more than half of Republican voters still believe that the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump.
The latter strongly denounces the work of this group of elected officials, comparing them to a “witch hunt”. And his party has already promised to bury the work of this commission if it were to take control of the House of Representatives during the mid-term legislative elections on November 8.
