FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: January 15, 2025 CONTACT: Nelly Decker, 202-306-7600 |
Report Crystalizes Trump’s Culpability in Criminal Conspiracy to Overturn the Will of American Voters, Inciting Violence Against the Peaceful Transfer of Power |
Washington, D.C. (January 15, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, released the following statement after the Department of Justice (DOJ) released Volume 1 of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on President-elect Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and seize the presidency, which resulted in the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol: |
“The Special Counsel report sets forth comprehensive and irrefutable evidence of Trump’s unprecedented and still shocking criminal scheme to overturn the legitimate 2020 election results and retain power. The report painstakingly documents how Trump and his co-conspirators engaged in a months-long conspiracy to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election, which Joe Biden won by more than seven million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college. The conspiracy encompassed numerous unlawful means, including by pressuring officials to fraudulently change the election results, wielding federal power to perpetuate false claims of electoral corruption, and ultimately, directing a violent mob to go to the U.S. Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the election and usurp the democratic will of the people and overturn the constitutional order.
“Special Counsel Smith’s report collects and synthesizes all the relevant facts showing how Donald Trump attempted to overthrow the 2020 presidential election. As part of his authoritarian crusade to cling to power, he told his followers to ‘fight like hell’ and incited a bloody insurrection which wounded and severely injured nearly 140 police officers who were fighting valiantly to protect the Congress, the Vice President, and the peaceful transfer of power. Donald Trump watched this shameful attack unfold on TV from the safety of his Oval Office dining room and refused to call on the National Guard, the Secretary of the Army, D.C. Police or any other police or military leader to respond to the rampaging mob he unleashed against law enforcement and his own government. And now, rather than facing legal consequences for this illegal assault, Donald Trump is preparing to return to the White House and exact revenge against public officials and private citizens who dared to stand up to his autocratic crusade.
“Trump’s offenses are compounded by his refusal to accept accountability and his unrelenting efforts to block the truth from coming out about his conduct—including by threatening and harassing the prosecutors and witnesses involved in DOJ’s investigation and subsequent litigation, and attempting to block the release of this very report at the eleventh hour.
“No amount of sinister revisionism by House Republicans can obscure or vaporize the plain reality described in the Special Counsel’s report—which validates and elaborates the findings of the January 6 Select Committee and the brave testimony of witnesses and police officers who fought tooth and nail, even when badly outnumbered by a vicious mob, to protect the Vice-President, Members of Congress and American democracy. Donald Trump engaged in a conspiracy to unlawfully seize and retain power, lied systematically to his followers and the American people, forged false vote certificates, pressured state and federal officials to make up votes and claims of fraud, and finally incited his supporters to engage in a bloody insurrection attack on the Congress and the Capitol.
“It is in the public interest for the Department of Justice to expeditiously release the second volume of Special Counsel Smith’s report so the American people have as full an accounting as possible of Donald Trump’s lawless and criminal conduct.” |
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The report has the following key findings: - Trump and His Co-Conspirators Engaged in a Months-long Effort to Overturn the Will of the American People Following the Results of the 2020 Presidential Election:
- “As set forth in the original and superseding indictments, when it became clear that Mr. Trump had lost the election and that lawful means of challenging the election results had failed, he resolved to a series of criminal efforts to retain power. This included attempts to induce state officials to ignore true vote counts; to manufacture fraudulent slates of presidential electors in seven states that he had lost; to force Justice Department officials and his own Vice President, Michael R. Pence, to act in contravention of their oaths and to instead advance Mr. Trump’s personal interests; and, on January 6, 2021, to direct an angry mob to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification of the presidential election and then leverage rioters’ violence to further delay it.”
- “Under this plan, they would organize the people who would have served as Mr. Trump’s electors, had he won the popular vote, in seven states that Mr. Trump had lost […] and cause them to sign and send to Washington false certifications claiming to be the legitimate electors. […] [t]he plan quickly transformed into a corrupt strategy to obstruct the certification proceeding and overturn the valid election results.”
- “Mr. Trump contacted state legislators and executives, pressured them with false claims of election fraud in their states, and urged them to take action to ignore the vote counts and change the results. Significantly, he made election claims only to state legislators and executives who shared his political affiliation and were his political supporters, and only in states that he had lost.”
- “As his efforts to directly pressure state officials to discount legitimate votes failed and the fraudulent elector plan unfolded, Mr. Trump also tried another tack: he attempted to wield federal power to perpetuate his fraud claims and retain office… [w]hen the Acting Attorney General advised Mr. Trump that the Justice Department could not just “snap its fingers” and change the election outcome, Mr. Trump told the Acting Attorney General and Acting Deputy Attorney General that they should “just say that the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
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- Trump Was Aware that the Claims He Made About Voter Fraud Were False:
- “Evidence from a variety of sources established that Mr. Trump knew that there was no outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 election, that many of the specific claims he made were untrue, and that he had lost the election. He knew this because some of the highest-ranking officials in his own Administration, including the Vice President, told him directly that there was no evidence to support his claims. Mr. Trump’s private advisors, both within and outside of his Campaign, told him the same.”
- “Mr. Trump and co-conspirators could not have believed the specific fraud claims that they were making because the numbers they touted-for instance, of dead voters in a particular state frequently vacillated wildly from day to day or were objectively impossible, including, for example, Co-Conspirator 3’s claims about voting machines that Mr. Trump privately acknowledged sounded ‘crazy’ before he publicly amplified them. Finally, at times, Mr. Trump made comments implicitly acknowledging that he knew he had lost the election. For example, in a January 3, 2021 Oval Office meeting regarding a national security matter, Mr. Trump stated in part, ‘[i]t’s too late for us. We’re going to give that to the next guy,’ meaning President-elect Biden.”
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- In His Efforts to Steal the Election, Trump Repeatedly Employed Tactics Including Threats and Intimidation to Try to Force Government Officials to Support His Plan:
- “A fundamental component of Mr. Trump’s conduct underlying the charges in the Election Case was his pattern of using social media to publicly attack and seek to influence state and federal officials, judges, and election workers who refused to support false claims that the election had been stolen or who otherwise resisted complicity in Mr. Trump’s scheme. After Mr. Trump publicly assailed these individuals, threats and harassment from his followers inevitably followed.”
- On January 6th, “Mr. Trump issued a Tweet attacking Mr. Pence and fueling the riot: ‘Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!’ One minute later, the United States Secret Service was forced to evacuate Mr. Pence to a secure location at the Capitol. When an advisor at the White House learned this, he rushed to the dining room and informed Mr. Trump, who replied ‘So what?’”
- “On January 2, 2021, just days before the election results were to be certified, [trump] called Georgia’s Secretary of State and pressed him to ‘find 11,780 votes’—Mr. Biden’s margin of victory in the state. When the Secretary of State refuted Mr. Trump’s false fraud claims, Mr. Trump issued a threat, stating that because the Secretary of State knew ‘what they did and you’re not reporting it ... that’s a criminal offense. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you.”
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- Trump Regularly Engaged in Witness Intimidation and Invoked Executive Privilege to Block the Truth About His Illegal Conduct, Posing Unique Challenges for Special Counsel Smith’s Investigation:
- The Special Counsel’s report emphasizes that Mr. Trump repeatedly attacked individuals involved in this case by issuing “threatening public statements” and “messaging daggered at likely witnesses and their testimony.” Individuals at the receiving end of these attacks faced “a torrent of threats and intimidation” that turned their lives “upside down” and forced the Office of the Special Counsel to “engage in time-consuming litigation to protect witnesses.”
- “The day after his arraignment, for example, Mr. Trump posted on the social media application Truth Social, ‘IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!’ […] The next day, one of his supporters called the district court judge’s chambers and said: ‘Hey you stupid slave n[****]r[.] * * * If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly b[***]h. * * * You will be targeted personally, publicly, your family, all of it.’”
- “A time-consuming investigative challenge that the Office faced was Mr. Trump’s broad invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence on a wide variety of topics. […] Mr. Trump’s repeated assertion of the presidential-communications privilege as a basis to withhold evidence required extensive preindictment litigation that delayed the Office’s receipt of important testimony and other evidence.”
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Background:
Ranking Member Raskin served as the lead impeachment manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump and served on the bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, which definitively proved that Trump incited insurrectionary violence at the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
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