WASHINGTON (AP) — Turns out, Jan. 6 was more than just the day when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.
It was the culmination, but also the start, of an enduring challenge for American democracy.
The House committee investigating Jan. 6, 2021 has shown how the deadly Capitol attack was sparked months earlier on Election Night 2020, when the incumbent president, Donald Trump, refused to admit he was trailing Joe Biden, and instead spewed false claims of voter fraud and declared himself the winner.
The defeated president spent the next eight weeks orchestrating an unprecedented attempt to overturn the election results and summoned supporters to Washington on Jan. 6 to finish the job.
And even after the blood, mayhem and deaths at the Capitol, Trump still refused on Jan. 7 to say the words that all those around him knew needed to be said: the presidential election was over.
The Jan. 6 committee cannot charge anyone with crimes, but it has produced a public record for history, one that’s still being written. It is showing how the insurrection at the Capitol is testing the resiliency of the nation’s democracy.
As Trump contemplates another White House run, he has denounced the proceedings as “so many lies and misrepresentations.”
Rep. Liz Cheney, a fellow Republican who is vice chair of the panel, said the case against her party’s president is being made not by Trump’s political enemies, but rather his own friends, campaign officials, people who worked for him and his own family.
“They have come forward and they have told the American people the truth,” Cheney said.
Here’s what we know from eight summer hearings of the House Jan. 6 committee.
‘TEAM NORMAL’ WARNS TRUMP NOT TO CLAIM ELECTION VICTORY
Election Night did not look good for incumbent Trump, as battleground states he had won four years earlier began to fall to Biden.
Campaign manager Bill Stepien testified this summer that it was no time to declare victory. But “Team Normal,” as some of Trump’s more experienced political aides called themselves, was no match for Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer who encouraged Trump to fight.
“This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said in an election night speech. “Frankly, we did win this election.”
For the next eight weeks Trump battled in court challenging the election results. When one judge after another rejected or declined to take up Trump’s claims of voter fraud, the defeated president latched on to another plan, from a conservative law professor John Eastman, to challenge the results when Congress met to certify the election, scheduled for Jan. 6.
Trump met privately with members of Congress who would reject the election results from their states, and encouraged hundreds of electors to send Congress his name as the winner, rather than Biden.
But “over and over again,” Cheney said, the president was told there was no voter fraud that could have tipped the election.
“This is bull—-,” former Attorney General Bill Barr testified that he told the president.
When told of Barr’s interview to an AP reporter declaring there was no fraud, the president threw his lunch in the Oval Office dining room. “There was ketchup dripping down the wall,” testified former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who helped the president’s valet mop it up.
‘WE’RE GOING TO WALK DOWN TO THE CAPITOL’
The committee revealed new evidence that the attack on the Capitol was not a spontaneous event but one set in motion by the president’s actions.
Summoning supporters to Washington for a “big” rally Jan. 6, Trump spoke before the crowd at the Ellipse outside the White House and sent them marching to the Capitol.
“We’re going to walk down — and I’ll be there with you,” Trump told the crowd. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol.”
The committee revealed in text messages from rally organizer Kylie Kremer that there were plans for a second stage to be set up outside…
Read More: What Jan. 6 probe revealed: Takeaways from summer hearings