Like prosecutors priming a jury, the House Select Committee made a powerful case to the nation Thursday night and Monday that Donald Trump ginned up the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021. He meant it to consummate a coup that he had been plotting even before the presidential election that he legitimately lost.
The riot that bloodied police officers as they bravely protected the Capitol was not spontaneous. It was not a one-off event. There was, as Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, said, “a sprawling, multi-step conspiracy” with Trump “at the center.” Monday’s testimony added more support to that argument, as campaign operatives and state and local officials described efforts to depict the election as illegitimate and subject to being overturned.
Those claims were undermined, not by Democrats but by some of Trump’s former appointees. BJay Pak, the former U.S. attorney for the North District of Georgia who abruptly resigned Jan. 4 under threat of being fired because he couldn’t find voter fraud (about the same time Trump was pleading with a top Georgia elections official to “find votes”) testified Monday that an alleged “suitcase of ballots” was really an official elections lockbox. In a recorded deposition, former U.S. Attorney General Bob Barr denied claims of a big vote dump in Detroit, called allegations of fraud in Philadelphia “absolute rubbish” and said the campaign wasted a month on investigating “idiotic” claims that a voting-machine manufacturer helped rig the election.
