By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Contributor
During two interviews on January 2, Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) outlined steps moving forward after months of investigation of the violent January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Donald Trump supporters.
The Chair of the special committee to investigate the January 6, 2021, attack said in a January 2nd interview that the violent insurrection “appeared to be a coordinated effort on the part of a number of people to undermine the election.”
Thompson also indicated that the Department of Defense may have interfered with assistance to the Capitol from the National Guard.
“There were significant inconsistencies in coordination, that the National Guard from the District of Columbia was slow to respond, not on its own, but it had to go to the Department of Defense. We have actually fixed that right now, where the mayor of the District of Columbia can access the Guard right now,” Thompson said.
Thompson is planning televised hearings of the committee’s work in January. Thompson also mentioned a task force within the committee that will investigate the financial support of Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The committee is bi-partisan with two Republicans: Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Liz Cheney (R-WY).
The attack on the legislative branch of the U.S. government happened on the same day that the election of President Joe Biden was to officially be certified as the victor of the 2020 presidential election by Congress. The certification process is typically a non-eventful procedure that involves officially receiving the certification papers of all the states during an hours-long ceremony and vote on the House floor.
There were 147 Republicans in the U.S. House who voted against the certification of Biden’s election even after the violent attack on the Capitol.
On January 6, 2021, former President Trump, who lost to President Joe Biden on November 3, 2020, by over 7,052,770 votes, had only 14 days left to remain in The White House before Biden’s inaugural. On the morning of January 6, 2021, Trump appeared at a gathering of his supporters and lied to them, as he had since November 2020 claiming the election was “stolen.” Trump’s lie that his election loss was the result of fraud has been advanced on Facebook by his supporters and in right-wing media non-stop.
““It is critically important, given everything we know about the lines that he was willing to cross — he crossed lines no American president has ever crossed before. You know, we entrust the survival of our republic into the hands of the chief executive, and when a president refuses to tell the mob to stop, when he refuses to defend any of the coordinate branches of government, he cannot be trusted,” Rep. Cheney said about Donald Trump on January 2.
Trump lost to Biden by double the number of votes that he lost to Hillary Clinton in 2016. Clinton won the popular vote by 2,868,686 votes but lost the electoral college 304 to 227.
“All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical-left Democrats, which is what they’re doing. And stolen by the fake news media,” Trump bellowed from a stage on the eclipse near The White House. “We will never give up; we will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved,” Trump continued citing no evidence.
Several Republican election officials in states such as Georgia, Arizona, and New Mexico certified Biden as the winner of the election without controversy.
Trump’s supporters violently attacked the Capitol shortly after Trump’s speech, over-running entrances, assaulting police officers and breaking glass doors as Vice President Michael Pence during the violent insurrection at the Capitol. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called Governors in surrounding states for assistance from their National Guard.
Trump’s supporters set up a fake guillotine they said was for Pence on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol between the reflecting pool and a memorial of U.S. Grant. Trump’s supporters chanted “hang Mike Pence” in the Capitol during the insurrection.
“We have significant testimony that leads us to believe that the White House had been told to do something. We want to verify all of it,” Thompson said on CNN.
The next committee meeting is expected soon.
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