Through eight hearings, 20 live witnesses and dozens of hours of recorded testimony, the House Jan. 6 committee has focused its case squarely on former President Donald Trump.
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As rioters broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Vice President Mike Pence was urged to leave the building and get to safety. In hearings, the House January 6 Select Committee laid bare just how deep the rift between then President Donald Trump and Pence became. Associated Press reporters Lisa Mascaro, Darlene Superville and Farnoush Amiri explain major takeaways from the hearing covering Pence's experiences that day and his determination to fulfill his duty and certify the election results. The committee paints Pence as a man who withstood the pressure from Donald Trump to aid him in overturning the election. Instead, Pence was determined to stay at the Capitol and finalize the vote for Joseph R. Biden.
Arizona's House speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, is among a series of state election officials who testified before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection where Trump backers tried to stop the certification of President Joe Biden's victory. The committee's first few hearings focused on Trump's pressure campaign to thwart Biden's victory – aimed at state election officials, at the Justice Department and finally at Vice President Mike Pence. The president's pressure ramped up as courts rejected dozens of lawsuits and after the states certified the electors in mid-December. Bowers testified about phone calls from Trump and his allies asking him to decertify Arizona's legitimate electors and replace them. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger also told the Jan. 6 panel about the now-infamous phone call when Trump asked officials there to "find 11,780" votes. "You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath," Bowers said he told Trump and his allies. He recalled lawyer John Eastman, a chief architect of Trump's plan to create slates of fake electors, telling him to "just do it and let the courts sort it out." Bowers said he repeatedly asked Trump's team for evidence of the widespread fraud they were claiming, but they never provided it. Raffensperger said his team investigated all of Trump's claims and went down every "rabbit hole," finding nothing. But Trump wouldn't accept it.
Wandrea "Shaye" Moss testified to lawmakers about how her life was upended when former President Donald Trump and his allies falsely accused her and her mother of pulling fraudulent ballots from a suitcase in Georgia. The former Georgia elections worker recounted in a wrenching appearance before the House Jan. 6 committee how the defeated president latched onto surveillance footage from November 2020 to accuse her and her mother, Ruby Freeman, of committing voter fraud — allegations that were quickly debunked, yet spread widely across conservative media. The committee also played testimony from Freeman, who sat behind Moss in the hearing room, showing support for her daughter and at one point passing over a box of tissues as lawmakers heard about their shattering ordeal. "There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere," Freeman told the committee in the prerecorded video. "Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one." "But he targeted me," she added. The emotional testimony from mother and daughter was one of the attempts by the Jan. 6 panel to show how lies perpetrated by Trump and his allies about a stolen election turned into real-life violence and intimidation against the caretakers of American democracy: state and local election officials and workers.
Donald Trump hounded the Justice Department to pursue his false election fraud claims, striving in vain to enlist top law enforcement officials in his desperate bid to stay in power and relenting only when warned in the Oval Office of mass resignations, according to testimony to the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Three Trump-era Justice Department officials recounted persistent badgering from the president, including day after day of directives to chase baseless allegations that the election won by Democrat Joe Biden had been stolen. They said they swept aside each demand from Trump because there was no evidence of widespread fraud, then banded together when the president weighed whether to replace the department's top lawyer with a lower-level official eager to help undo the results. The hearing, the fifth by the panel probing the assault on the Capitol, made clear that Trump's sweeping pressure campaign targeted not only statewide election officials but also his own executive branch agencies. The hearing focused on a memorably tumultuous time at the department after the December 2020 departure of Attorney General William Barr, who drew Trump's ire with his public proclamation that there was no evidence of fraud that could have changed the election results.
Associated Press congressional reporter Mary Clare Jalonick explains highlights from the seventh House Jan 6 Select Committee hearing. She focuses on the chaotic White House meeting that took place on December 18, 2020 between former President Donald Trump's personal advisors and his professional counsel. In this meeting, Trump's personal advisors spun conspiracy theories to the former president about voter fraud. Trump's professional counsel found the advice from the other group to be outlandish, and the disagreement escalated into a profanity laced explosion between the two groups, complete with physical threats of violence. This argument led to an early morning tweet from Trump, further pushing the story of voter fraud and calling his supporters to Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2020.
The House Jan. 6 committee has closed out its set of summer hearings with its most detailed focus yet on the investigation’s main target: former President Donald Trump. The panel on Thursday examined Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021, as hundreds of his supporters broke into the U.S. Capitol, going through the deadly afternoon in minute-by-minute fashion to show how long it took the former president to call off the rioters. The panel focused on 187 minutes that day, between Trump’s call for his supporters to march to the Capitol and when he told them to go home.
The House committee investigating the Capitol riot has shown never-before-seen outtakes from a speech prepared for then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 7, 2021, in which he was supposed to say that the election he lost to Joe Biden was over. But Trump is seen in the video as bristling at that line - that the 2020 election was in fact decided and over. In a room of supporters that included his daughter Ivanka Trump, the president is heard saying, “I don’t want to say the election is over.” The clips that were left on the cutting room floor show a president unwilling to admit defeat even hours after his supporters violently breached the Capitol to try to stop the electoral count in his name. Trump is seen trying to take out several lines of the script he believed went too far. In the outtakes, Trump is visibly angry. At one point he hits his hand on the podium -- as he works through the prepared remarks, with Ivanka Trump and others heard chiming in with suggestions.
