Then-President Donald Trump attempted a coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and that will be a centerpiece of committee hearings in Congress next month, said Democrat Jamie Raskin, a committee member who led the prosecution of Trump’s second impeachment.
On that day in 2021, Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building, encouraged by the Republican president in a speech outside the White House to protest formal congressional certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in a November 2020 election.
“This was a coup organized by the president against the vice president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in an interview with Reuters, National Public Radio and The Guardian newspaper, when asked what he has learned so far from the committee’s probe.
U.S. Representative Bennie Thompson, who chairs the special House of Representatives committee organized by Democrats to look into events leading up to the Jan. 6 assault, has told reporters he expects public hearings to resume in May.
“We’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by (then-Vice President) Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan,” said Raskin, a member of the House special committee.
It was unclear whether Raskin, during the interview, was expressing only his thoughts or the thinking also of fellow lawmakers serving on the special committee made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans.
via Reuters
