The situation has turned deadly serious for the House January 6 Select Committee. They have been building a picture of what happened on that fateful day and what led up to the failed coup. The ultimate question for its members is, did Donald Trump have any part in planning the attempted coup? And now they have the answer.
The House Committee had been sifting through those attempts to build a legal case against Trump. Most recently, it seized upon the ex-president’s various attempts to confiscate the voting machines. It found that Trump was directly involved in three different approaches.
The Select Committee started with the outer ring of those known to have some affiliation with January 6. The most obvious were those who stormed and desecrated our symbol of freedom, our Washington, D.C. Capitol Building. Eventually, the circles tightened until they reached the ex-president’s innermost circle of advisors. And they discovered that there was not just the one attempted coup, but many attacks.
He wanted to order the Pentagon to forcibly seize them. Then, he tried to get Attorney General (AG) William Barr to take them through the Department of Justice (DOJ), and finally, he attempted to have the Department of Homeland Security confiscate them.
The New York Times investigated whether there was a national security finding. That was what a president must have to “order to an intelligence agency to take covert action.” Then, the Select Committee uncovered this:
‘[A] document containing presidential findings concerning the security of the 2020 election after it occurred and ordering various actions.’
The Business Insider reported:
‘On Tuesday, the January 6 House select committee said it was investigating Trump’s role in those plans.’
Among the reams and reams of documents, the January 6 Committee found what they had been seeking. Former Trump attorney Sidney Powell generated a “Presidential Findings to Preserve Collect and Analyze National Security Information Regarding the 2020 General Election.”
Committee member Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said:
‘We certainly intend to run to ground any evidence bearing on an effort to seize voting machines and to use the apparatus of the federal government to confiscate these machines in the service of the president’s aim to overturn the election. We want to fully flesh out the facts: How close did this come to being operationalized? What kind of pushback did they receive? Who was a part of this particular scheme? We want to answer all those questions.’
Another January 6 Committee member Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said:
‘It is alarming that the former president apparently seriously contemplated extraordinary and legally not permitted courses of action to seize voting equipment from states and localities.’
At a December 18, 2020 meeting, former CEO of Overstock and funder of many of Trump’s sedition attempts, Patrick Byrne said that he, former Trump National Security Advisor (NSA) Michael Flynn, and Powell would get into the White House without an appointment, by “hook or by crook.”
Flynn wanted to declare “martial law” and “rerun” the entire election.
Byrne wrote about the failed coup in a book:
‘We pointed out that, it being Dec. 18, if he signed the paperwork we had brought with us, we could have the first stage (recounting the Problematic 6 counties) finished before Christmas.’
Another Select Committee member Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) called the plans “the stuff of dictators and banana republics:”
‘His overriding objective was to overturn the election. He said that as recently as this weekend. He set into motion a range of tactical ploys to accomplish his goal.’
Representative Raskin continued:
‘It’s hard to imagine a more outrageous federal assault on voting rights than a presidential seizure of voting machines without any action by Congress at all and no basis in law. That is the stuff of dictators and banana republics.’
The January 6 Committee is hot on the trail of Trump and delving deeper.
Three White Lions podcast, Gloria Christie reads a chapter from her book of the same title. She also writes for the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Gloria Christie Report her newsletter for people on the go. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor in a briefer version of Bipartisan Report. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery (in process). Find her here on Facebook.