The Jan. 6 select committee says the evidence they have shows that former President Donald Trump and his campaign tried to illegally obstruct Congress from counting electoral votes and “engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
In a release of its findings, filed in federal court late Wednesday, the committee suggested that its evidence supported findings that Trump himself violated multiple laws by attempting to prevent Congress from certifying his defeat.
“The Select Committee is investigating the violent attack on our Capitol on January 6, 2021, and an effort by the former President of the United States to remain in office by obstructing Congress’ count of the electoral votes. Plaintiff John Eastman purports to have been the former President’s lawyer in connection with that effort. But Plaintiff’s role was not simply as an advisor; he spoke at the rally on the morning of January 6, spreading proven falsehoods to the tens of thousands of people attending that rally, and appears to have a broader role in many of the specific issues the Select Committee is investigating. The Select Committee requires a detailed understanding of all of Plaintiff’s activities in order to inform Congress’ legislative judgments and to help ensure that no President can threaten the peaceful transition of power ever again,” the committee wrote in a filing submitted in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.
“The Select Committee also has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the committee wrote in a filing submitted in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California.
According to the President’s senior campaign advisor, soon after the election, a campaign data expert told the President “in pretty blunt terms” that he was going to lose.
In the release of the committee’s findings, including excerpts of nearly a dozen depositions from top aides to Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, the committee described a president who had been informed repeatedly that he lost the election and that his claims of fraud were unfounded, only to reject them and continue to mislead the American public, says the committee.
The committee says Trump then pushed top advisers to continue strategizing ways to overturn the election results.
On November 12, 2020, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a public statement noting “unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation” about the election, and affirming that “[t]here is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”
Evidence released by the Select Committee says that Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue discussed allegations of voter fraud with President Trump on multiple occasions in December of 2020—and informed him, both as to specific allegations and more generally, that the President’s claims of massive fraud sufficient to overturn the election were not supported by the evidence.
According to Rosen, at a December 15, 2020 meeting at the White House that included Rosen, Donoghue, Ken Cuccinelli (Department of Homeland Security), Pat Cipollone (White House Counsel), and Mark Meadows (White House Chief of Staff), participants told the President that “people are telling you things that are____November 3rd election was the most secure in American history,” and “[t]here [wa]s no
evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised”).
According to Donoghue, he personally informed the President on a December 27, 2020 phone call “in very clear terms” that the Department of Justice had done “dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews,” had looked at “Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada” and concluded that “the major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed.”
The panel released its findings as part of a legal push to force John Eastman, an attorney who was a key driver of Trump’s strategy to subvert the 2020 election, to produce emails tying together elements of the scheme they described.
The panel revealed testimony that offered a detailed account of Eastman’s efforts to provide a legal strategy that would justify ordering Pence to overturn the election single-handedly when he presided over Congress’ electoral-vote-counting session on Jan. 6, 2021.
In the filing, the committee said, ” As the President and his associates propagated dangerous misinformation to the public, Plaintiff was a leader in a related effort to persuade state officials to alter their election results based on these same fraudulent claims.
We will be updating this story, but have included the complete filing in pdf format below.
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