Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack, suggested on Tuesday that recent comments by former President Donald Trump “said the criminal part out loud” regarding his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump made this announcement earlier in the week. wrongly claimed on his website that efforts to reform the Electoral College prove that his scheme to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to disregard legitimate electors’ votes Instead, count fake ballotsIt was legally recognized.
“Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” Trump said in his statement.
Legal scholars have rejected that notion — if Trump’s claims were true, some have notedThis would allow the sitting vice president to accept or deny any election result on any basis without any oversight. Instead, proponents of reforming the Electoral Count Act say that change is necessary to prevent the exploitation of existing “ambiguities” in the statutes; this is precisely what Trump loyalists in Congress sought to doThey tried to stop the will of voters last election.
Tuesday CBS News asked Raskin whether the commission’s case against Trump had become simpler in light of the former president’s recent statement about trying to overturn the 2020 election results. Raskin said that it did, “in the sense that Donald Trump said the criminal part out loud.”
“That makes it very clear what he was up to,” he added, referring to Trump’s statement.
The commission’s investigation has still been challenging, Raskin went on, noting that Trump “has been trying to sandbag and obstruct us by getting his greatest intimates in his entourage — like Roger Stone and Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows — not to testify.” But most people who have been asked to give depositions have done so willingly, he said, even without being subpoenaed.
The January 6th commission is looking into a variety of attempts by Trump White House to overturn the 2020 election results, including attempts at seizing voting machines from states where Trump falsely claimed fraud had occurred. According to recent reporting from The New York TimesTrump played a bigger role in this plot than anyone thought. He directed his subordinates to Rudy Giuliani’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to ask the heads at least three distinct executive branch departments whether they were authorized to remove voting machines.
Trump loyalists in Washington also wrote an executive order that would have ordered the National Guard to seize election equipment. Trump didn’t sign the order, perhaps because he was told it would have been illegal.
Jeh Johnson, the former secretary of Homeland Security, said Tuesday that forcibly seizing elections machines from states could have made it a crime.
“It could potentially constitute a crime in my view,” Johnson said. “Certainly conspiring to seize voting machines, conspiring to hijack our election that way, to hijack our democracy, and I hope the January 6 committee and even the Department of Justice are looking at this apparent evidence.”
