Jamie Raskin Hits Trump With Reveal Of Jan. 6 Evidence

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The House committee investigating the Capitol riot is continuing its fervent work to uncover the truth surrounding last year’s Trump-inspired attack on the Capitol that was angled towards attempting to stop Joe Biden from taking his duly decided place as president. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the riot panel, discussed in a new interview how committee investigators will soon be hosting public hearings in which House members on the panel will be aiming to essentially lay out their case for the American people. And as Raskin tells it, following the riot committee hearing from hundreds of people and obtaining over 100,000 documents including records from Trump’s administration that the ex-president tried to keep hidden, Trump is directly at fault for what amounts to an attempted coup.

Excuses from Trump and others don’t change the reality of what they were doing and the fact that the election outcome they were trying to overturn was documentedly legitimate. Raskin remarked:

‘This was a coup organized by the president against the vice president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election… It’s what the political scientists call a self-coup, because it’s not the military or some other faction attacking the president. It’s the president, fearful of defeat, overthrowing the constitutional process… Trump was prepared to seize the presidency and likely to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law. So, we’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection, an attempted coup, and we were saved by Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan and the valor and the bravery of our officers who stood strong against the attempt to just overrun the whole process.’

Raskin also observed how “we don’t have a lot of experience with coups in our own country and we think of a coup as something that takes place against a president,” making Trump’s actions more jarring. Trump could run again — and win — expanding the threat that his actions pose to democracy. Check out Raskin’s comments below:

Joshua James, who is involved with the violent, far-right group known as the Oath Keepers, admitted alongside his recent admission to a charge of seditious conspiracy that he’d been directed to prepare for potential lethal force amid attempts to keep Trump in power. James admitted that Stewart Rhodes — who founded and leads the Oath Keepers and has also been charged with seditious conspiracy — “instructed [James] and others to be prepared and called upon to… use lethal force if necessary.” Individuals involved with the group were preparing for the possibility of Trump invoking the law that Raskin referenced called the Insurrection Act, which allows presidents to call up militias. Members of the Oath Keepers were prepared to serve as Trump’s militia. In other words, there was a serious threat inherent in the riot beyond something like simple trespassing on Capitol grounds. As summarized by The Washington Post, Rhodes and fellow members of his organization who’ve also been charged with seditious conspiracy have been accused “of coordinating travel, organizing into teams, undergoing paramilitary training, and staging weapons,” some of which Rhodes bought.