The most high-profile congressional investigation since Watergate on Thursday concluded that former US President Donald Trump deliberately spread false claims about the 2020 presidential election and incited a mob of his supporters to attack the US Capitol.

The long-awaited 8-chapter, 845-page report from the Congressional Investigative Committee on the January 6, 2021 Capitol Hill attack provides a roadmap for possible criminal charges against Trump and others.

Written in the form of a narrative, the document breaks down the story set out by the commission at its hearing earlier this year.

On Monday, the commission voted to turn its findings over to the Justice Department for possible prosecution. Among them are four possible federal charges against Trump. The former president is accused of providing assistance and encouragement to those involved in the rebellion.

The Justice Department is conducting its own investigation into the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill that killed five people.

“While you read this report, please consider this: Vice President Mike Pence, along with many of the appointees surrounding Donald Trump, have been working to prevent many of the worst parts of Trump’s plan to cancel the election,” wrote the commission’s vice chairman. republican. Liz Cheney, in the preface to the report.

“It was not a given. It’s nice to assume that the institutions of our republic will always resist those who seek to overthrow our Constitution from within. But our institutions are only strong when those who hold office are loyal to the Constitution,” he adds.

Report details

The report begins with the weeks leading up to the election and evidence gathered by the committee that Trump intended to declare victory on election night, regardless of what the results showed.

It documents Trump and his allies trying to cancel the election, details court cases, calls for state legislatures to cancel the vote count, and a campaign to pressure Justice Department officials to step in and declare, without evidence, that they stole the election. .

Like a series of committee hearings, the report concludes that for 187 minutes, Trump sat in the White House dining room on January 6, 2021, watching a mob smash windows and destroy the Capitol, ignoring his family, employees, and other Republicans. urged him to intervene.

“Our country has gone too far to allow a defeated president to become a successful tyrant, undermining our democratic institutions, inciting violence and, as I have seen, opening the door for those in our country whose hatred and intolerance threaten equality and justice for all. Americans,” Democrat committee chairman Benny Thompson said in the preface to the report.

Republicans, who will take control of the House of Representatives on January 3, said they have no plans to continue the work of the committee to investigate the terrorist attack in the Capitol. In fact, current House Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who is the front-runner for House Speaker next year, said Republicans could investigate the work of the fact-finding committee itself on January 6, 2021.

This announcement set the investigation into the Capitol Hill attack into a race to release the report and possibly millions of pages of relevant evidence in less than two weeks.

With information from APE-MPE