Donald Trump should not be allowed to become President of the United States again or to hold any other public office. This is underlined in its final report by the committee of the United States House of Representatives that for 18 months has investigated the bloody assault on the Capitol perpetrated on January 6, 2021 by more than 2,000 followers of the former president.
One of the conclusions and proposals of the 840-page text, published at dawn this Friday, recommends that Congress create a "formal mechanism" that prevents access to any federal or state position to all those who participated in the insurrection of 6- E, with Trump in the front row.
The nine members of the committee - seven Democrats and two Republicans - invoke the fourteenth amendment of the Constitution in this regard. The precept establishes that those who have sworn to comply with the Constitution and then have been involved in an "insurrection" or have "helped the enemies of the Constitution itself" may be "disqualified" and banned from holding posts in the Administration again.
And the committee concludes that the 6-E coup was the fault of "one man", Donald Trump, who conceived "a multi-part plan to annul the 2020 presidential election." A plan that went through trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power by suspending the ratification of the electoral results called for that day in Congress.
It was Trump who "ignited the flame" of the 6-E insurrection through his calls to march on the Capitol under the false denunciation of a "theft" of the elections, the investigative committee reiterates in its conclusions. And for this reason, he asks the Attorney General's Office to charge the former president for prosecution for four crimes: incitement to insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the nation, conspiracy to make a false statement and obstruction of an official congressional procedure.
As the text also indicates, the mob that Trump encouraged at his rally prior to the assault on the parliamentary headquarters did not want to limit itself to marching peacefully before the Capitol. And the acting president at that time knew it, according to some of the key witnesses who testified before the commission at the time.
In any case, the Secret Service of the police confiscated hundreds of weapons from the attendees of that pre-coup rally. Although "thousands of people" chose not to go through the metal detectors installed at the meeting place, some of them so that the agents would not seize the weapons they were carrying, some 28,000 did. The result, according to the report, was the confiscation from these people of "269 knives, 242 pepper spray canisters, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, six pieces of bulletproof vests, three gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments and 17 miscellaneous items such as scissors, needles, or screwdrivers."
The report pays special attention to the link between Trump's plans and the action of the ultra groups that led the occupation of the Capitol. The bottom line is that the ex-president's lies about an alleged tongo in the 2020 elections activated the mix of far-right militants and conspiracy theorists that led the assault.
"The attack on January 6th has often been described as a riot, and that is partly true. Some of those who entered the Capitol had not planned to do so. But it is also true that extremists, conspiracy theorists and others were prepared to fight. It was an insurrection," the committee members say. And they add that the assailants "responded to President Trump's call for action." A call that he had made unequivocally, in one of his incendiary tweets, days before what would be the biggest attack on democracy in the United States: "Be there. It will be savage!"
And it was.
