As the ninth Jan. 6 hearing came to a close, the nine members of the select committee investigating that Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol were presented with a resolution from Vice Chair Liz Cheney: Would they vote to issue a subpoena for Donald J. Trump in relation to the attack on the Capitol? They would. With a roll call vote, the nine members of the panel were all yeas. “This is a question about accountability to the American people,” Chairman Bennie Thompson said. “He must be held accountable.” Trump would be the first president in nearly 50 years to be subpoenaed by Congress. But the stakes—the future of democracy—require it, argued Cheney. Within hours, Trump responded on Truth Social with a defense of Jan. 6. “The Unselect Committee knowingly failed to examine the massive voter fraud which took place during the 2020 Presidential Election – The reason for what took place on January 6th,” he claimed. This hearing—along with the eight previous ones—laid bare Trump’s culpability in instigating the violence at the Capitol and his months-long plan to overturn the will of the American people that paved the way. (…) The committee revealed that Tom Fitton—the president of Judicial Watch, a right-wing legal outfit known for spreading baseless claims of voter fraud to roll back Americans’ access to the polls—had sent a memo to Trump on Oct. 31, 2020, urging him to simply declare, “We had an election today and I won.” On Nov. 3, Election Day, at 5 p.m., long before all the votes had been counted, Fitton indicated that he had spoken to the president about the draft memo. Former Vice President Mike Pence’s legal counsel Greg Jacob testified that Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short had also informed him of the president’s plan to prematurely declare victory, and that he had written a memo reflecting that it was imperative that the vice president could “not be perceived by the public as having decided questions concerning disputed electoral votes prior to the full development of all relevant facts.” The committee also reviewed footage and audio recordings of Roger Stone—a longtime Trump confidant with connections to far-right groups who stormed the Capitol like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—and Steve Bannon—former Trump campaign chief strategist and White House adviser—who both suggested Trump would declare victory whether or not he had the votes. “I really do suspect that [the election result] will still be up in the air,” Stone said on Nov. 1, as shown in the video clip provided by Danish documentary filmmakers of “A Storm Foretold.” “When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine tenths of law. ‘No, we won, fuck you. Sorry, you’re wrong, fuck you.’” Stone also advocated for violence. “I say fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence,” Stone says in another clip a day before the election. While Trump lied to the American people in public, in private, he admitted that he had lost the election, according to numerous witnesses. White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that Trump was embarrassed to have lost to President Joe Biden and refused to publicly admit his defeat. Kinzinger revealed that Trump had signed a memo to bring home troops from Afghanistan and Somalia by before the inauguration of Biden. That memo was reported by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book “Peril,” but the committee obtained interviews with those involved in drafting it and those who received it. It would have been “catastrophic,” according to officials, but it was evidence that Trump knew he was not likely to remain in the White House and was willing to sacrifice the national interest in order to create problems for Biden to deal with. The committee also presented new evidence from the Secret Service. The agency had turned over more than 1 million pages after the agency came under fire for deleting texts from agents’ phone during that key period, a result, the agency claims, of a software update. The emails and chat texts revealed by the panel provided further evidence that intelligence agencies and Trump knew that there were threats of violence on Jan. 6, and that Trump sent his armed supporters to the Capitol anyway.
via right wing watch: The Jan. 6 Committee Exposes How Trump Fomented the Capitol Insurrection Every Step of the Way