“Those who invaded our Capitol and fought police for hours were motivated by what President Donald Trump had told them: that the election had been stolen from him and he was the rightful president. Trump summoned the insurrectionists, gathered them together and lit the flame of this attack.”
The phrases are not from any member of the Democratic Party. They were said this Thursday night by the very conservative and Republican deputy of the United States Congress Liz Cheney, daughter of the no less right-wing former Vice President Dick Cheney and now vice president of the House of Representatives committee that investigates the bloody assault on Capitol Hill by part of thousands of Trump supporters on January 6, 2021: according to her, "a clear and flagrant violation of the law and the Constitution aimed at changing the outcome of an election (the 2020 presidential ones)."
It was one of the important moments of the first and very careful televised hearing of the 6-E investigative committee after 11 months of work that included conducting a thousand interviews and examining more than 140,000 documents.
A video with harsh images of the assault, mostly unpublished and a collection of forceful statements by former advisers and relatives of the former presidents; of a Capitol police savagely attacked by insurgents; of a documentary filmmaker who witnessed a meeting of ultra leaders involved in the rebellion, as well as of some of the aggressors themselves convicted or accused of sedition, served to, political statements aside, prove to what extent Trump orchestrated what is considered the greatest attack on the United States democracy.
The first group of statements, most of them unpublished until now, brought together half a dozen advisers and officials appointed by the former leader who explained how they had tried to stop Trump's maneuvers to subvert the election results and remain in power; how they had rejected his affirmation that the elections had been stolen from him and how they had tried to stop - in the face of the leader's passivity - the violent coup of 6-E.
The recorded testimonies of former Attorney General Bill Barr and the daughter and former adviser of the still Republican leader, Ivanka Trump, were resounding and defining.
Barr recounted how he told Trump that his claim that the presidential election had been a fraud was "bullshit" with no basis. And, in this regard, Ivanka Trump said: "I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he said."
In the second part of the session, lasting two hours and which will be followed by five other televised sessions in the next two weeks, the committee also showed recorded statements that would prove the coordination between Trump and the ultra groups that took the lead in the assault: the Proud Boys (proud boys) and the Oath Keepers (Guardians of the oath).
Members of both formations already convicted of the events affirmed before the judges, as was shown in the hearing, that Trump had summoned or "called" them to participate in the rebellion against Congress on the day of ratification of the electoral result.
Documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who had been working with the Proud Boys for weeks with no idea what they were planning, said that more than two hundred of them who attended the rally where Trump warmed up the mob before the assault headed to the Capitol before the assault. recently defeated president at the polls began to speak. It would seem, as the president of the committee, Bennie Thompson, suggested, that they wanted to do a preliminary survey of the land, discover possible gaps in the police surveillance of the building and thus find the best penetration points to invade it.
The video of the attack, with scenes of the savage assaults on police officers often taken from the officers' own body cameras, depicted a perfectly organized and timed operation to take over the Capitol.
One of the ultras who led the attack appeared in the video reading, as if it were a military harangue, one of the tweets with which Trump had denounced the alleged fraud and called to rebel against him.
Many of the insurgents, of whom 810 have been arrested and only 65 sentenced to prison terms, sought out Vice President Mike Pence to kill him for refusing to annul, from his position as President of the Senate, the ratification of Joe Biden as the legitimate winner of the presidential. "Hang Pence!" they yelled. And Trump commented - Cheney revealed -: "They may be right and Pence deserves it."
