The assault on the Capitol was the “culmination of a coup attempt” : a year and a half after the events of January 6, 2021 which shocked the world, a parliamentary commission of inquiry placed former President Donald Trump at the center of a “conspiracy” aimed at keeping him in power.
A raging crowd in the halls of the United States Congress, elected officials crawling on the ground with gas masks… The demonstrators stormed the seat of Parliament this day after ” encouragement “ of the former president, said Bennie Thompson, the head of the commission, at the start of a series of hearings supposed to prove the existence of a deliberate campaign to overturn the result of the presidential election of 2020, won by Joe Biden .
“President Trump summoned the crowd”
For nearly a year, this group of elected officials (seven Democrats and two Republicans) has heard more than 1,000 witnesses, including two children of the former president, and gone through 140,000 documents to shed light on Donald’s specific actions and gestures. Trump before, during and after this event that shook American democracy.
“President Trump called the crowd, assembled the crowd and lit the fuse for this attack”, asserted Liz Cheney, one of the few elected Republicans who agreed to sit on this commission. To support its conclusions, the commission broadcast unpublished and extremely violent images of this cold winter day during which thousands of supporters of Donald Trump gathered in Washington to denounce the result of the 2020 election.
“War Zone”
These videos show a flood of people storming the headquarters of Congress, attacking police officers, calling for « hang on » Vice President Mike Pence, and a protester reading Donald Trump tweets through a megaphone amid a cheering crowd. “It was in no way a tourist visit to the Capitol”, launched Bennie Thompson in allusion to those among the Republicans who brandished this argument. Superimposed on some of these images is a montage of Donald Trump calling his protesters “peaceful” and ensuring that there is ” love in the air “.
The commission also received testimony from a police officer, Caroline Edwards, the first member of the police force to have been injured by the rioters on January 6, comparing the surroundings of the Capitol to “a war zone”.
More than a year after the storming of the Capitol, millions of Donald Trump supporters remain firmly convinced that the 2020 election was marred by fraud. And this despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. “Our democracy is still in danger. The plot to counter the will of the people is not over”alerted Bennie Thompson.
The main interested party, Donald Trump, once again praised this day on Thursday, assuring that the assault on the Capitol was the “Biggest Movement in History to Make America Great”.
The majority of Republicans reject its work, the leader of the conservatives in the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, denouncing the commission “the most political and least legitimate in the history of the United States”.