Trump lit that fire, says House report on Capitol Hill insurrection

Panel urges steps to safeguard US electoral integrity, asks Congress to weigh barring Trump from office

The House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol issued a more than 800-page final report on Thursday, delivering a detailed case that former US President Donald Trump incited the violence in a failed attempt to hold onto power.
 

The committee also said Congress should consider whether to bar Trump and others tied to the January 6 attack from public office,  aimed at preventing future attempts to overturn a US election. The committee called for assessing whether anyone — possibly including Trump — who took an oath of public office and later stoked the insurrection should be disqualified from future government service under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. It also recommended closing loopholes in the congressional count of presidential electors, while also strengthening oversight and training of the Capitol Police.
 

The report culminates an investigation that spanned a year and a half and captured public attention with disclosures of Trump’s behind-the-scenes fury and his efforts to pressure state officials and the Justice Department to overturn the election.
 

“The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, who many others followed,” the report asserts in its executive summary, placing the mob invasion of the Capitol within “a multi-part plan to overturn the 2020 Presidential election.”
 

The panel of seven Democrats and two Republicans concluded its work on Monday with the first-ever congressional criminal referral against a former president. “Donald Trump summoned that mob to Washington, DC.,” Representative Bennie Thompson, a Democrat who chaired the panel, wrote in a foward. “Afterward, he sent them to the Capitol to try to prevent my colleagues and me from doing our Constitutional duty to certify the election. They put our very democracy to the test.”
 

The chapters of the report expand on the narrative the committee laid out in nine hearings this year with an aim of setting a record for history and potential prosecution of Trump and several associates. Investigators for the panel interviewed more than a thousand witnesses and went over millions of pages of documents.
 

Outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said in a forward that the committee’s work was “a clarion call to all Americans: to vigilantly guard our Democracy and to give our vote only to those dutiful in their defense of our Constitution.”
 

The panel’s findings add to the legal and political troubles plaguing Trump’s 2024 re-election bid, which he announced barely a month ago. 
 

Another House committee decided on Tuesday to release six years of Trump’s tax returns that he has long fought to keep private.