Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on - The January 6th Report

Foreword copyright 2023 by Elizabeth Holtzman, former US Congresswoman

The documents in this book have been released by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol and no copyright is claimed.

The text in this edition corresponds to the original report released by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol at approximately 9:56 p.m. on Thursday, December 22, 2022. Any subsequent updates to the publicly available report made by the Committee are not reflected in this edition.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Brian Peterson

ISBN: 978-1-5107-7675-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-7676-0

Printed in the United States of America

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

BY ELIZABETH HOLTZMAN, FORMER US CONGRESSWOMAN

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol did a remarkable job. It fearlessly told the truth about former president Donald Trumps efforts to seize the presidency illegally and by force.

The Committee decisively proved its central conclusions: Donald Trump knew he lost the 2020 electionhe had been advised by his own campaign staff and others close to him of this fact and admitted he had lost to White House staffers. Trump also knew that his claims of electoral fraud were falsehe had been told this repeatedly by his own attorney general William Barr and other top Department of Justice officials who had fully investigated the claims. Still, he persisted in telling the Big Lie that he won, a strategy developed months before the election, and plotted to seize the presidency using an unlawful, many-pronged approach.

Alone among all US presidents, Trump rejected the peaceful transfer of powerthe hallmark of American democracythereby seeking to trample on the votes of the American people, the Constitution, and the laws of the country. (He has not given up on the endeavor. In December 2022, Trump called for the termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution so that he could be installed as president.)

Although Trumps tactics failed, our democracy hung by a thread. What most Americans took for grantedthat the loser of the presidential election would accept defeat without trying to take office by forcewas no longer assured.

The Committees task was not simple. It had to gather the factsno easy matterand then present them, including information from more than one thousand witness interviews and hundreds of thousands of pages of documents, in a concise and dramatic way. To do this, and to avoid the pitfalls of prior congressional hearings, it retained a top television executive as a consultant. The Committee gave each hearing a subject matter focus, used video clips to supplement live testimony, and generally assigned most of the witness questioning to one or two Committee members at each hearing, giving the testimony coherence and strength. The Committee wove the evidence it uncovered into a compelling narrative, winning widespread praise and a large viewership.

The Committee also understood the importance of persuading Republicans and independents, and thus presented evidence largely through Republican and pro-Trump witnesses, such as Trumps attorney general William Barr, his White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Ivanka Trump, his campaign staff, and others in his orbit or employ. This made it much harder to attack the proceedings credibly as partisan or the testimony as a Democratic plot.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi named two Republicans to the Committee in addition to seven Democrats. Representative Liz Cheney, with her impeccable Republican credentials, and Representative Adam Kinzinger are smart, independent thinkers, and both had voted to impeach Trump for fomenting the January 6 insurrection. Representative Cheney was also appointed Vice Chair and had a central role in the hearings. Although blocked by Republicans from creating an independent commission with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans (like the Commission investigating 9/11), Speaker Pelosi refused to abandon the effort to document the truth and determined to convene a select committee instead.

The Committees work revealed two key points: (1) Trump personally played a central role in the various efforts to overturn the election; and (2) some courageous Republicans, often Trump supporters, resisted his efforts, helping to preserve our democracy but encountering serious threats to themselves and their families, as well as other adverse consequences.

According to their testimony, two of those pro-Trump Republicans, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona House Speaker Russell Bowers, were targets of Trumps plot to persuade swing states to revise their vote count and make Trump a winner. Cajoling and threatening, Trump called Raffensperger, asking him to find enough votes for him to win. (That call became the subject of a criminal investigation in Georgia.) Raffensperger refused. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, also called Bowers, urging him to convene the state legislature to declare Trump the winner although he had lost. Bowers also refused, and lost his primary election as a result. Bowers repeatedly requested facts supporting Trumps fraud claims, but got none; instead, Giuliani admitted to him: We have lots of theories; we just dont have the evidence.

To overturn the election, Trump ran roughshod over people as well as our democracy. As witnesses stated, as part of the Big Lie, Trump and Giuliani engaged in racist and sexist smearing of two Black women who were Georgia election workers. Giuliani even claimed the women were trading USB drives affecting votes as if they [were] vials of heroin or cocaine when they were simply sharing ginger mints. The women gave heartbreaking testimony about how their lives were completely upended by the resulting threats against them that forced them to leave the election jobs they loved.

Another Trump scheme involved the Department of Justice. According to testimony before the Committee, Trump wanted his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, to send a letter to the Georgia legislature expressing concerns about Georgias 2020 election. When Rosen refused because the Department of Justice had no such concerns, Trump tried to replace him, but backed down when told there would be mass resignations at DOJ. This may have reminded Trump of Watergates Saturday Night Massacre, when the attorney general and his deputy resigned rather than carry out Nixons improper order to fire the Watergate special prosecutor. That led to impeachment proceedings and Nixons downfall.

The Committee showed how after being told that a specific fraud claim was baseless by his DOJ appointees, Trump would nonetheless repeat that claim publiclyand do it again and again. As Barr stated, Trump did not seem interested in the facts. Significantly, Trump told Rosen and his deputy: Just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the R[epublican] Congressmen. Despite being told that the DOJ had not found corruption or other problems that would have affected the outcome of the 2020 election, Trump wanted the DOJ to lieand put its formidable credibility behind the liein order to persuade others that the election had been stolen from him.