Another Watergate Trump

In the US Congress, they are trying to prove the involvement of the former president in the assault on the Capitol

On June 9, almost a year and a half after the riots that the supporters of Donald Trump arranged in Washington, the first public hearings on the investigation of these events were held in the US Congress. One of the goals of the so -called committee on January 6 was to establish whether the events of that day were only riots, or was it an attempt by a coup d'etat, to which Trump had a hand. Almost 19 million viewers followed the broadcast of the hearings; Many American observers compare them with hearings in connection with the 1973 Watergate (and this is not the first event in the history of Trump’s presidency, which is compared with the scandal). About what conclusions the congressmen came to, says political scientist Jan Veselov.

The special committee on investigating the attack on the Capitol of the United States on January 6 (also known as the “Committee of January 6”) was officially established on July 1, 2021. At first it was assumed that the inter -party commission of both chambers of the Congress (Senate and the House of Representatives) would be formed - by analogy with the investigation of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. But, since the Republicans from the Senate did not support this idea, the committee was created by the efforts of the Democrats from the House of Representatives, to which only two members of the Republican Party joined . They both received places in the committee, the remaining seven, together with the post of chairman, occupied the democrats.

What did the committee do?

The main task of the Committee was to establish whether Donald Trump tried to influence the voting votes of the votes of the votes of the voting in the Congress, thereby violating the procedure for choosing the US president, and if so, as it was due to the riots and attempts to storm the Capitol building. In the process of work, the committee studied more than 140 thousand pages of various documents and interviewed more than a thousand witnesses (about a hundred received a summons about the testimony to testify).

The committee paid special attention to several moments

• What Trump and his entourage were engaged in riots. Lawmakers wanted to almost permanently restore the picture for about three hours after the start of the assault on the Capitol. For this, a large number of interviews were recorded with the White House workers and people from the nearest circle of the former president, including his relatives. After the long lawsuit, the committee was also able to receive documents from the presidential archive (some were torn - the archivists had to glue them), as well as the calls about the calls in which the “failure” was discovered with a length of 7.5 hours (which leads some journalists to the idea that Trump could use another phone).
• What was the scheme with the so -called fake electors , who were supposed to take the place of legal electors from the states, where, according to Trump, mass falsification of the elections took place. The Committee sent the subpoenas to 20 people related to this scheme, including the head of the Republican Party of Arizona Kelly Ward, the candidate for the Governors of Pennsylvania Dagu Mastriano and Mark Fincha, who is running for the post of secretary of Arizon (responsible for the election). The testimony of the personal lawyer Trump and the former mayor of the New York, Rudy Juliani, who tried to convince the district authorities in Michigan, were obtained to transfer the Trump for voting (similar attempts to pressure legislators and authorities are investigated in a number of other states).
• As the Trump team used accusations of falsification of elections to collect donations and whether there is a fraudulent component in this. Financial information was requested both by the National Committee of the Republican Party and the company Salesforce , which was engaged in sending out advertising letters for Trump's campaign. With their help, it was possible to raise more than 200 million dollars , but, contrary to promises, only a small part of this amount went to services that were supposed to dispute the election results, and the bulk went to pay debts . Also, employees who participated in the Trump campaign consciously compiled emails with a request for donations so that by default there was a setting about the weekly (and not one -time) transfer of funds.
• The role in the riots of right -wing organizations Proud Boys and Oath Keepers . The Committee sent the summons to the leaders of both groups, Henry Tarrio and Elmer Roads.

A number of witnesses refused to cooperate with the committee. Former Trump advisers Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro were accused of disrespecting Congress and are waiting for the court session. The former head of the presidential administration, Mark Medous, first collaborated with the committee, but later refused to transfer some documents to him. Which is quite uncharacteristic, the committee called for testing five existing congressmen-republicans, who publicly stated that they were talking to Trump by phone on January 6. All of them also refused to testify.

What became known during this time?

The main part of the news became known from the documents that Mark Medous managed to transfer to the committee. For example, on November 4 (the day after the election, but before the results of the results), the former Governor of Texas and the then Minister of Energy in the administration of Trump Rick Perry wrote to Medous that if Trump loses in Georgia, North Carolin, retirement and other states where the Republicans control the legislative assemblies, it will simply be possible not to recognize the election results and send their electorals. Correspondence with the host of the conservative channel of Fox News Schonn Hanniti , the Republican Congressman Jim Jordan and the wife of the Supreme Court of Clarence Thomas Ginny Thomas , with whom Medous discussed and/coordinated attempts to cancel the voice of electors (and in one of the messages with regrets said that this was not possible). A more specific expression of these efforts was presentations with a step -by -step plan for the cancellation of elections and a memorandum with the legal justification for this author of the Trump team - John Eistman (he refused to testify against himself before the committee).

Medous also called up with Rudy Juliani and the Republican congressmen, with whom he discussed the idea of ​​a march at the Capitol. As it became known from the same correspondence, after the start of the riots the son of Trump Donald Jr. and even three leading Fox News wrote to him to convince Trump to condemn the capture of the Capitol and call the protesters to disperse. But this did not interfere with the same TV presenter on the air to doubt that Trump supporters participated in the riots.

What did we learn from the first public meeting?

Only the Committee Chairman Democrat Benny Thompson and the Vice-Chairman of the Republican Elizabeth Cheney (who had already received a fair amount of criticism from colleagues in the party for participation in the committee) enjoyed the right of the introductory word at these hearings. Both used their time to promote the narrative, according to which the events of January 6 were an attempt by a coup, in the center of which Donald Trump was located. In particular, Cheney directly said that Trump had a plan of seven points to cancel the results of the presidential election.

In her speech, she also mentioned a number of interesting details-in particular that Trump, having learned about the calls to the protesters to hang the vice president Mike Pence for not canceled part of the votes of the electors, said that he "deserves this." Also, according to her, the Republican Congressman Scott Perry and a number of his colleagues turned to Trump with a request for preventive pardon, afraid that they would be pursued for an attempt to challenge the election results.

There were quite a few video materials at the hearings: in addition to a 10-minute reconstruction of events on January 6, which used previously not published personnel, the speeches of congressmen accompanied the cuts from interviews with people from the Trump administration. For example, former prosecutor general William Barr said that he considered the idea of ​​mass falsification of the 2020 elections to “nonsense”, which the daughter of Trump Ivanka who worked in the White House echoed . Her husband and adviser to Trump Jared Kushner called the “nagging” threats of the White House lawyers to resign if Trump continues to insist on falsification of the elections and will try to cancel them. And the chairman of the committee of the chief of staff, Marc Milli, said that the vice president of Pence gave all orders to accelerate the protesters, while the head of the presidential administration Mark Medous demanded that everyone say that decisions were made exclusively by Trump.

Two witnesses also participated in the first meeting. The first word was taken by the police officer Capitol Caroline Edwards, who was injured during the riots on January 6. She spoke quite emotionally about her experience and chaos that reigned that day. After it was the British documentary, Nick Quested, who shot the meeting of the leaders of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers Henry Tarrio and Elmer Rouds on January 5, as well as members of Proud Boys, who moved to the Capitol building on January 6, even before the rally of Trump supporters.

During the almost two-hour meeting of the committee, something fundamentally new was not heard, but the picture of the events of that day was supplemented by curious details. Nevertheless, lawmakers managed to draw attention to their work: in Google, the request “Hearing January 6” became the third most popular, and the hearings themselves were broadcast on the live the largest cable and broadcast news channels, with the exception of the conservative Fox News .

What next?

Within a month there will be several more meetings at which it would be discussed, in particular, whether Trump knew that he had lost before making an application for falsifications in the elections; His attempts to put on the vice president Mike Pence and the States authorities in order to cancel the election results, as well as his calls to the protesters to start the assault on the Capitol.

The committee will be expected that the final report will be released in September - a few weeks before the intermediate elections to Congress. As for the possible accusations against Trump and other members of his presidential administration, this issue is in the competence of the Ministry of Justice - the Congress committee can only give recommendations of a legislative nature.

Jan Veselov