Donald Trump and the White House were “at the center” of events triggering last year’s violent Capitol insurrection, and the House Jan. 6 select committee has uncovered evidence against the former president “about a lot more than incitement,” panel member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said on Monday.
The panel will be “laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on January 6th” at upcoming televised hearings beginning Thursday, the lawmaker vowed in an interview with Washington Post Live.
Raskin emphasized that Trump was already impeached for inciting the violence of Jan. 6 last year, but the required two-thirds of the then-Republican-dominated Senate did not vote to convict him. Nevertheless, “commanding majorities found that he had, in fact, incited this insurrection,” Raskin noted.
“But the select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here,” he stresses in the video clip below.
Raskin spoke to the Post the same day four leaders of the Trump-supporting Proud Boys were charged with felony seditious conspiracy for their roles in the planning and execution of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Sunday, legendary Watergate journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward also linked Trump to sedition, calling him the “first seditious president in our history.”
Raskin told the Post that the Jan. 6 committee “has found evidence of concerted planning and premeditated activity.”
“The idea that all of this was just a rowdy demonstration that spontaneously got a little bit out of control is absurd. You don’t almost knock over the U.S. government by accident,” he says in the clip below.
Raskin said the committee hearings are “going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”
This is an extraordinary and unprecedented event in our history,” he added. “You really have to go back to the Civil War to understand anything like it.”
Any resulting charges against Trump for his role in the events of Jan. 6 will be up to the Department of Justice, Raskin noted. But he pointed out that in litigation concerning Trump ally and “coup memo” attorney John Eastman, federal U.S. District Judge David Carter “stated in a decision that it was ‘more likely than not’ Trump committed federal offenses” in his attempts to stop the certification of the 2020 election.
Following the committee’s lengthy investigation involving some 1,000 witnesses and the examination of 125,000 documents, “we think that there is overwhelming evidence of this plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election in coordination with a violent assault on our body,” Raskin noted.
“We’re going to lay it all out there, but the prosecutors are going to have to sort it out with respect to individual defendants ... I have confidence in the ability of the Department of Justice to do their job.”
Read and listen to Raskin’s full interview here.