The Jan. 6 House select committee released its long-awaited final report Thursday, capping an 18-month probe of the 2021 breach of the U.S. Capitol by a violent mob of supporters of former President Donald Trump.
The 845-page report was issued three days after the bipartisan committee voted unanimously to refer Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation and possible prosecution over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden.
The first chapter of the report is entitled “The Big Lie,” a reference to Trump’s repeated false claims that he had won the election.
The panel has already begun sharing its evidence with the DOJ, which last month appointed a special counsel to investigate whether Trump or others unlawfully interfered with the transfer of power to Biden.
Without Trump’s encouragement, the Jan. 6 riot, “would have never occurred,” committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in an interview earlier Thursday with MSNBC. “It would have been the normal transfer of power that we do every four years when there is a presidential election.”
“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but under no circumstances do you tear the city hall up or the courthouse up, and, God forbid, the United States Capitol,” Thompson said. “It was just something that I think for most Americans it was beyond imagination … And there are still a lot of people who can’t fathom why our people would do that.”
The report comes weeks after Trump announced that he will seek the Republican nomination for president in 2024.
Both the DOJ and House probe are focused, among other things, on the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of Trump’s backers stormed the U.S. Capitol and forced lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence to flee the chambers of Congress.
The invasion disrupted a joint session of Congress that was being held to confirm Biden’s victory in the Electoral College, the entity which selects winners of presidential elections.
Pence, who was presiding over that session, resisted pressure by Trump and others to refuse to accept the Electoral College slates of several swing states that had given Biden his margin of victory.
The House committee conducted more than 1,000 witness interviews, which includes ones with Trump’s White House aides and lawyers, several of his adult children, and his close allies. The panel also compiled hundreds of thousands of documents as part of its investigation.
Trump spread false claims of election fraud before and after the 2020 election and pursued numerous attempts to reverse his loss to Biden in the weeks after Election Day. His public campaign to do so culminated with a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, where he urged the crowd to march with him to the Capitol to press Congress to undo the election results.
Trump never marched to the Capitol that, but instead spent hours in the White House as his supporters attacked police officers inside and outside the Capitol, and swarmed…
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