What is Donald Trump’s responsibility for the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021? Are the former president’s maneuvers after the 2020 election an attempted coup? After a year of investigation, a parliamentary committee will present its first results on Thursday. During those hearings, a group of representatives with Democratic majorities promised to “bring to the American people a summary of the results of a coordinated campaign designed to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent a transfer of power.” Over the course of about a year, the committee, known as “January 6,” heard nearly a thousand witnesses, including the former president’s two sons, to shed light on the facts and actions of Donald Trump and those around him. It claims to have reviewed more than 100,000 documents and sent about a hundred subpoenas to testify.
Through short text messages, white papers and videos, a number of key lawyers and witnesses will present the various scenarios that Trump and his entourage considered to change the course of the 2020 presidential election, up to and including the attack on the Capitol on January 6th. 2021. On this cold winter day, under thick, cloudy skies, thousands of Donald Trump supporters in Washington denounce the results of an election that the Republican billionaire lost. Hearing the president inviting them to “go to the Capitol,” a human wave swept over the US Congress, sending shockwaves around the world. As a sign of the importance the commission wants to place on its investigation, the first hearing has been set up in prime time at 8:00 pm on Friday and will be broadcast on several news channels across the country. Five more hearings will be held during June to complement this initial presentation.
One of the committee members, Jamie Ruskin, confirmed that what he would reveal would be “explosive”. “No president has ever come close to doing what happened here, in an attempt to stage a coup from within to sabotage elections and circumvent the constitution,” he recently told a Georgetown University committee. “But also use a violent insurgency made up of violent extremist groups, white supremacists, racists and fascists to support the coup,” the Democrat added.
In recent months, some of the evidence in the possession of a parliamentary inquiry has been leaked, including a draft executive order to confiscate voting machines and a flood of SMS messages sent to Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Thus, the committee has a big task – to create a narrative that can attract and convince the attention of the public. And if the images of a man with horns on his head, wandering the halls of this building, are still fresh in the memory, then public opinion polls put this investigation at the very bottom of the list of concerns for American families after inflation or fuel prices. And there’s another problem, because 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.
