The focus of today’s session of the commission investigating the January 6, 2021 raid on Congress was former President Donald Trump’s pressure on state officials to change the 2020 election result.
In the session, Trump’s pressure on local officials to nullify the results in critical states such as Georgia and Arizona, where he lost the election, was at the forefront.
Although they were also targeted from time to time during the January 6 process, officials who resisted the demands of Trump and his advisers and defined themselves as Republican conservatives testified at the commission session.
Bennie Thompson, Chairman of the January 6 Commission, said in a statement at the start of the session, “It was part of the method they used to pressure public officials to betray their oath. “A group of electoral officials in several key states stopped Donald Trump from subverting our democracy.”
Speaking at the session, Congressman Adam Schiff, a member of the Democratic Party commission, also drew attention to the role of Trump’s rhetoric in the process leading up to the January 6 Congressional attack, in his speech before the witnesses gave their testimony.
Adam Schiff said, “The President’s lie is a dangerous cancer on politics and society. “If you can convince the Americans that they can’t trust their election and that the result was illegitimate when they lost, what’s left but violence to determine who should rule?”
“You want me to do something against my oath”
In the session, Republican Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the House of Representatives of the state of Arizona, won by Democrat Joe Biden.
Answering the questions of Adam Schiff, a member of the January 6 Commission, Bowers called Trump’s advisers and talked about the demands and pressure he had to change the results in Arizona.
This portion of the session was marked by some evidence and witness statements that Trump was planning to send fake electoral delegate lists to nullify the 2020 election results.
Rusty Bowers said in a phone call with Trump that the former president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, had come up with the idea of replacing electoral delegates in Arizona with delegates who would vote for Trump.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this before. I swore to uphold the Constitution and uphold the laws of the state of Arizona. I said you want me to do something that doesn’t match the oath I took. This is a completely foreign theory to me. I said I would never do anything of this magnitude without consulting with qualified lawyers in depth.”
Rusty Bowers was honored with the John F. Kennedy Courage Award this year, along with Liz Cheney, the Vice-Chairman of the January 6 Commission, for his courage in protecting and defending democracy.
The Georgia official, whom Trump said to “find 11,780 votes”, is also in the session.
In today’s session, the testimony of state secretary Brad Raffensperger, the former top election official for the state of Georgia, is also heard.
Brad Raffensperger answers questions about the phone call where Trump asked him to get 11,780 votes that could reverse the election results in the state.
The recording of the meeting, in which Raffensberger turned down Trump’s request, emerged days before the January 6 Congressional attack. In that phone call, Trump repeatedly brought up the allegations of irregularity, which proved to be inaccurate, and expressed the possibility of committing a crime if Georgia state officials did not change the vote count.
The state of Georgia, on the other hand, counted the votes three times in the 2020 presidential election and confirmed that Biden won the election in this state with a margin of 11,779 votes.
58 percent of Americans think Trump should be blamed
According to a study by ABC News and Ipsos after the third session of the January 6 Commission, 58 percent of Americans polled thought that former President Donald Trump should face formal charges in connection with the attack on Congress.
40 percent of those polled, whose results were shared on Sunday, also argued that Trump should not face any charges.
And 46 percent of those polled think Trump has a large amount of responsibility for the attack on Congress.
next session is Thursday
The January 6 Commission, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, will hold another session on Thursday.
The first of the public hearings organized by the January 6 Commission was broadcast in prime time, the time zone where televisions are watched the most, and more than 20 million people watched the session live.
The last public session of the commission is planned to be held in September, before the congressional elections in the USA in November.
Sessions are important to the Justice Department investigation
Evidence that will be presented against former president Donald Trump at this week’s hearings could also be important to the Justice Department’s investigation into the fraudulent selection panel scheme.
Trump supporters tried to stop the ratification of the results by pressing the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, where the election results won by Democratic President Joe Biden will be registered.
In the commission investigating the January 6th Congressional attack within the House of Representatives, in the first of the public hearings, Trump’s role in the Congress attack, in the second, that Trump knowingly spread the unfounded allegations of election irregularities, and in the third, that Trump voted for the then Vice President Mike Pence on January 6 and before. Efforts to pressure him to refuse to be counted were focused on.