The Overwhelming Evidence Of The Jan. 6 Hearings And Why Trump Must Be Held Accountable
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | July 21, 2022
The House Jan. 6 hearings have exceeded all expectations.
Blockbuster hearing after blockbuster hearing have produced overwhelming evidence to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that former President Donald Trump led a conspiracy to attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election he had clearly lost and that he incited the unprecedented attack by Americans on the Capitol.
We knew prior to the hearings that Trump had personally pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the vote count in Georgia to make Trump the winner – an action that would have been blatantly illegal and that Raffensperger refused to do.
We learned that Trump personally participated in an unsuccessful scheme to get the top officials of the Justice Department to send a letter to Georgia state officials that included false claims about voting irregularities in the state and that was intended to have electors appointed by the state legislature.
We learned that Trump was personally involved, working with his chief coup strategist lawyer John Eastman, in a scheme to get fake electors substituted for the electors properly chosen by the voters.
We learned that Trump repeatedly pressured Vice President Mike Pence to violate his constitutional duties in presiding over the congressional counting of electoral votes, urging him not to accept properly submitted, legal slates of presidential electors.
We learned in the hearings that Trump personally knew the crowd he had gathered in Washington and unleashed on the Capitol on January 6 was armed and dangerous when he sent them to the Capitol to “fight like hell.”
We learned that Trump stubbornly refused multiple pleas by Republican Members of Congress and White House officials to call off the mob he had incited to attack the Capitol as they continued the violent attack for more than three hours, resulting in 140 police officers being injured and five police officer deaths.
Trump’s warped obsession with his own Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him will not go away.
Last week, 20 months after the election, Trump was still at it. He called Robin Vos, the Republican Speaker of the Wisconsin House and urged him to decertify Biden’s victory in Wisconsin. Vos said he told Trump he could not do that under the Constitution.
One of Trump’s main strategies to steal the presidential election, documented by the Committee, involved taking advantage of loopholes in two antiquated 19th-century laws that govern the process for electing the President – the Presidential Election Day Act of 1845 and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 (ECA). (The 1845 Act was incorporated into the ECA.)
Efforts to repair these laws were unveiled yesterday in the Senate and the House.
In the Senate, a bipartisan group led by Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) introduced legislation to fix the ECA. In the House, Jan. 6th Committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) announced that the Committee will propose its own legislation to repair the ECA.
It is unfortunate that the Senate legislation does not include any of the essential provisions to overturn state voter suppression and election sabotage laws that were in the voting rights bill killed in the Senate in January. Senators Manchin and Collins played key roles in killing that vitally important legislation.
In the end, there must be accountability for the first attempted presidential coup in our history and for the unprecedented violent attack by Americans on our Capitol.
The accountability must begin with the person who led these efforts – former President Donald Trump.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
