Notice of heavy weather for Donald Trump on the investigation front. The parliamentary committee investigating the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 voted unanimously Thursday, October 13 to summon him to appear, while the Supreme Court refused the same day to hear his appeal in the case of search of his home.
If the parliamentary committee is going to summon the former American president to appear, it is “because he is required to answer for his actions”, according to its leader Bennie Thompson. Donald Trump “is the person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6. So we want to hear from him,” Bennie Thompson said at a public hearing. “He has to be accountable. He has to answer for his actions,” he added.
But it’s also about the commission “doing everything it can to tell the fullest story possible and provide recommendations to help ensure nothing like January 6 happens again in the future.” future,” he continued.
Will the Republican billionaire comply with the summons? He didn’t say so in his first reaction to the news, but he strongly denounced the elected officials. Why did the commission “not ask me to testify months ago? Why did they wait until the very end, until the last moments of their last meeting? Because the commission is a total fiasco that has only served to further divide our country,” he wrote on his Truth Social social network.
The mission of the panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, is to shed light on the behavior of the president before, during and after the attack on Capitol Hill, which had shocked the whole world. On that day, January 6, 2021, supporters of Donald Trump stormed the seat of Congress to try to prevent elected officials from certifying the victory of his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Donald Trump continues to maintain against all evidence that the ballot was “stolen” from him.
During Thursday’s hearing, the commission unfolded the thread of events as drawn by its investigations, showing that the ex-president had planned “well in advance” to declare himself victorious in the 2020 election, before even if the results are not known. “His intention was clear, ignore the rule of law and stay in power,” said Republican Adam Kinzinger. The elected democrat Zoe Lofgren she evoked “a premeditated plan of the president to declare his victory, whatever was the true result”. In support of their statements, the elected officials screened several videos of the ex-president, some of his relatives or former employees of the White House.
In images shot just before the 2020 presidential election by a Danish team for a documentary, we can hear Roger Stone, a longtime ally of the former Republican president, say that he doesn’t care about the vote. “Fuck the vote, let’s go straight to violence,” he said. Roger Stone, who has not been charged in connection with January 6, disputed the authenticity of the videos.
The commission also replayed a recording of a call from Donald Trump to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in which the ex-president says he “needs” some 11,000 ballots in his name, a enough numbers to beat Joe Biden in this southern state. She also unveiled elements from hundreds of thousands of pages provided by the Secret Service, the elite police responsible for the close protection of high state officials. The documents confirm evidence presented at previous hearings that Donald Trump inflamed the crowd of his supporters despite being told of the potential for violence, lawmaker Adam Schiff said.
In a significant moment, never-before-seen images of Congress officials who had taken refuge in a secure location on January 6 were released. We see the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Chuck Schumer frantically making phone calls for reinforcements from law enforcement.
Since its creation, the commission has questioned more than a thousand witnesses, including two children of Donald Trump, and peeled tens of thousands of documents. The investigative report is due to be made public by the end of the year, but likely not before the November 8 parliamentary elections that will determine which party will control Congress for the remainder of President Biden’s term.
Other bad news for the former American president, who flirts with the idea of running for a new term in 2024: the Supreme Court of the United States rejected his appeal on Thursday. On October 4, the billionaire had sent him an urgent appeal so that none of the 11,000 documents seized at his residence in Mar-a-Lago escaped the independent expert responsible for reviewing them. He challenged a decision of a court of appeal which prevents this expert from having access to a hundred documents classified as confidential.
When he left power in January 2021, Donald Trump took entire boxes of documents. However, a law of 1978 obliges any American president to transmit all of his e-mails, letters and other working documents to the National Archives. On August 8, federal police agents conducted an unprecedented search of his home on the basis of a warrant for “retention of classified documents” and “obstructing a federal investigation”, and seized about thirty boxes. Since then, Donald Trump says he is “persecuted” politically and assures that the documents seized are personal or declassified. As is customary, the high court, which has six out of nine conservative magistrates, including three appointed by Donald Trump, did not justify its decision.
