The House investigation into the Capitol riot continues to move forward despite former President Donald Trump’s loud complaints.
During an appearance this weekend on CBS’s Face The Nation, riot investigation committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) spoke to new evidence the committee is gathering against Trump, including from recent hours-long testimony by former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone. Asked about the contents of the panel’s public hearing planned for this coming Tuesday, Raskin said:
‘We’re going to continue the story of Donald Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. And at the last hearings, we showed how lots of doors were closing on him, if not all the way at least part of the way, when the state legislatures, that didn’t work for him… The attempt to get DOJ to say that the election was corrupt had not come through. The effort to intimidate election officials, like Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, had not succeeded. But now, he was turning his attention to January the 6th. And we’re gonna get to use a lot of Mr. Cipollone’s testimony to corroborate other things we’ve learned along the way… He was aware of every major move, I think, that Donald Trump was making to try to overthrow the 2020 election and essentially seize the presidency. And so I considered his testimony valuable.’
Raskin also indicated a meeting at the Trump White House on December 18, 2020, would be a significant focus of forthcoming committee proceedings. Individuals involved in that meeting include prominent extremists on Trump’s side like Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, and Rudy Giuliani. It’s shortly after that meeting concluded when Trump posted to Twitter encouraging his supporters to show up in D.C. on January 6. “Be there, will be wild!” Trump stated on Twitter at the time. Raskin added as follows:
‘Donald Trump was, of course, the central figure who set everything into motion. He was the person who identified January 6 as the date for the big protest. And he announced that in his tweet in the middle of the night on December 19, after a crazy meeting, one that has been described as the craziest meeting in the entire Trump presidency, ended December 18… [That Twitter post was] the first time in American history when a president of the United States called a protest against his own government, in fact, to try to stop the counting of electoral college votes in a presidential election he had lost. Absolutely unprecedented, nothing like that had ever happened before. So people are going to hear the story of that tweet, and then the explosive effect it had in Trump World and specifically among the domestic violent extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country at that point.’
Check out Raskin’s comments on CBS below:
