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CNN
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The Jan. 6 commission used its final public meeting Monday to sum up its 17-month investigation with a simple closing statement: All roads lead to Donald Trump.
Members focused on how the former president’s direct involvement in efforts to nullify the 2020 election makes him responsible for the violence that unfolded at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and unfit to hold future office.
The commission made the case to both the public and the Justice Department that there was evidence to bring criminal charges against Trump under multiple criminal statutes, including obstruction of official proceedings, defrauding the United States, making false statements, and aiding or abetting sedition .
The commission released a summary of its report on Monday and plans to release the full report on Wednesday, as well as transcripts of the commission’s interviews.
Here are the conclusions from the last public meeting of the commission:
For months, the committee debated whether to refer Trump to the Justice Department for prosecution.
On Monday, the commission did not hesitate.
The committee referred Trump to the Justice Department on at least four criminal charges, while saying in its summary that it had evidence of possible charges of conspiracy to injure or obstruct an officer and seditious conspiracy.
In practice, referral is a symbolic measure. The Justice Department is not required to act, and regardless, Attorney General Merrick Garland has already appointed a special counsel, Jack Smith, to take over two Trump-related investigations, including the Jan. 6 probe.
But the formal criminal charges and the release of the report this week underscore how much the commission has dug up since Jan. 6 and exposed Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the run-up to Jan. 6. The ball is now in the DOJ’s court.
Committee Chairman Benny Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, said he was “fully confident that the work of this committee will help provide a road map to justice and that the agencies and institutions responsible for ensuring justice under the law will use the information, which we’ provided assistance in their work.’
Members of the panel repeatedly pointed to Trump’s personal involvement in nearly every part of the broader plot to overturn the 2020 election, and focused squarely on his role in the violence that unfolded on Jan. 6.
Monday’s presentation was a convincing closing salvo for the panel, which said Trump was seeking to destroy “the foundation of American democracy.”
“Donald Trump broke that belief. He lost the 2020 election and he knew it. But he chose to try to stay in office through a multi-part scheme to overturn the results and block the transfer of power,” Thompson said. “Finally he called a mob in Washington and, knowing they were armed and angry, directed them toward the Capitol and told them to ‘fight like hell.’ There is no doubt about it.”
Specifically, the panel said Trump “oversaw” legally dubious efforts to submit fake voter rolls in seven states he lost, arguing that evidence showed he actively worked to “transmit of fraudulent Congressional Electoral College ballots and the National Archives,” despite concerns among his lawyers that it might be illegal.
The members emphasized that Trump knew the election was not stolen but continued to push baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in an attempt to overturn Joe Biden’s legitimate victory.
The committee again relied on video — an effective and memorable tool the group used during its closed-door witness testimony and harrowing scenes of the violent attack on the Capitol — to make its case against Trump.
Near the start of the hearing, the committee showed a 10-minute video montage laying out all of its allegations against Trump, from witnesses who say Trump was told he lost the election by his aides because of the former president’s inaction on Jan. 6 as the violence in The Capitol was unfolding.
The montage went step-by-step through Trump’s efforts to block his election loss, showed how his attacks turned the lives of poll workers upside down and played CCTV footage of police being attacked by rioters.
Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona — one of four subpoenaed GOP lawmakers the group referred to the House Ethics Committee on Monday — tweeted before the hearing that the committee was a “partisan fraud.” Representative Troy Nels, a Texas Republican who boycotted the committee, called it a “partisan witch hunt.”
But the panel is actually bipartisan.
It’s important to remember how it all started. While there was partisan bickering over which Republicans would be allowed to serve on the panel, House Democrats were willing to give committee seats to GOP lawmakers who had literally voted to overturn the results of 2020. Instead, Republicans boycotted.
But two Republicans volunteered to join the committee: Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was the No. 3 Republican in the House at the time, and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a six-term lawmaker who was a rising star in the party. Both brought with them Republican Party officials who worked for the committee.
Certainly Cheney and Kinzinger are outliers in their conference because they are anti-Trump. And that’s the crux of Trump’s criticism of the committee — that it’s full of Trump haters. Yet even as they oppose Trump, Cheney and Kinzinger are deeply conservative Republicans. Neither will return to Congress next year — Kinzinger retired and Cheney lost his primary this summer.
During Monday’s hearing, Kinzinger described how his fellow House Republicans were complicit in Trump’s efforts to overturn the election. He pointed to evidence that Trump wanted senior Justice Department officials to “put a veneer of legitimacy” on his claims of voter fraud so that “Republican congressmen … could distort, destroy and cast doubt” on the results of the election in 2020
No matter what Trump and his allies say, Democrats will forever be able to accurately claim that the panel’s findings, conclusions, final report and punitive referrals are bipartisan.
The end is near, at least for the commission.
Thompson said the committee’s full report will be released later this week. It will be a historical document that will be studied for generations. Never before has a sitting president tried to steal a second term.
Additional “transcripts and documents” will be released before the end of the year, Thompson said.
The sheer volume of this material cannot be overstated. The panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, likely generating tens of thousands of pages of transcripts. Many of these interviews are filmed, meaning the band has hundreds of hours of footage to release very soon.
These upcoming releases will provide fodder for Trump’s critics. But it would also fulfill a key demand from some of Trump’s allies — that the group disclose the full context of its interviews. (Up until that point, the commission had been very selective about which snippets of witness interviews were played at public hearings.)
The current Congress ends on January 3, 2023, and then the Commission will cease to exist. But the Justice Department’s investigation, overseen by special counsel Smith, continues.
Of the nine committee members, four will not return to Congress. In addition to Cheney and Kinzinger, Democratic Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy of Florida retired, while Congresswoman Elaine Luria of Virginia was one of a handful of Democratic House incumbents to lose their seats in the 2022 midterms last month.
This story has been updated with additional details.
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