Eighteen months and 800 pages later, the special committee of the United States Congress in charge of investigating the January 6, 2021 uprising in Washington is preparing to write its final chapter with the imminent unveiling of its final report, the main lines of which were released on Monday, and transcripts of several testimonies made public on Wednesday and Thursday.
These publications closely follow the recommendation made to the United States Department of Justice last Monday by this group of elected officials to open a criminal investigation against former US President Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection and conspiring to against the American state. Among others.
A historic decision for this committee which, by meticulously documenting the failed coup attempt, orchestrated by a president then in office in the United States, is now preparing to bring this tragedy into the country’s great history book. To prevent something like this from happening again, he hopes.
“It is indeed a fundamental and above all historical document that will hold American presidents accountable in the future in the face of the democratic laws of the country, summarizes Jeremi Suri, professor of history at the University of Texas joined by The duty in Austin. Donald Trump’s lies will be a thing of the past, but the evidence in the report will endure. They will be consulted and quoted many times over many decades. »
“One Man”
After meeting with 1,000 witnesses — most of them Republicans, the commission emphasizes in its report — and after sifting through mountains of documents, the group of parliamentarians arrives at the “necessary conclusion”, perhaps we read in the executive summary of the final report: “the central cause of January 6th was in one man: former President Donald Trump […]. None of the events of January 6 would have happened without him. »
That day, frustrated by his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, the populist launched his supporters, many of whom he knew were nevertheless armed, against the Capitol, in the hope of preventing the official certification of the presidential poll results establishing victory for Democrat Joe Biden. Five people lost their lives in this uprising.
The evidence accumulated by the commission of inquiry shows that the attack on the dome of democracy and on the electoral process was cleverly planned by Donald Trump and his entourage on January 6 and in the days preceding the tragedy.
The plan was to purposely nurture the idea of massive electoral fraud, “the big lie,” the document says, and then set in motion the mechanics of a coup. “President Trump’s decision to falsely and illegally declare victory on election night and call for a halt to the vote count was not a spontaneous decision,” it read. It was premeditated. »
“The evidence in this report now makes crime a central part of Donald Trump’s political legacy,” says Jeremi Suri, who hosts the educational podcast titled This is Democracy. It is a corpus that will be used both by the Department of Justice for its future investigations and by historians to assess and understand the illegal actions of Donald Trump during his presidency. »
Make an impression
Barely seven months after the end of his presidency, a group of 140 historians had already ranked him among the four worst heads of state in the history of the country, and this, since 1789. The pressure is now strong on the ministry of Justice to hold the ex-president criminally responsible for his attempt to corrupt American democracy. “The study of democracies that have collapsed has taught us that the best prerequisite for a successful coup remains a failed coup whose instigators go unpunished”, recalled in our pages the American historian Nancy MacLean, a professor at Duke University in North Carolina, last June, at the start of the public hearings of the commission of inquiry.
“The members of this committee hope, and even expect, that their report will go down in history and make a lasting impression,” said political scientist Brian Gaines of the University of Illinois in an interview. But I doubt that they succeeded in reaching conclusions capable of thwarting the certainties in the polarized political landscape which is ours. »
Donald Trump’s lies will be a thing of the past, but the evidence in the report will endure
On Wednesday, a group of elected Republicans decided, as a revolt, to make public their own vision of the events of January 6 in an alternative report. The document focuses on the failings of the Capitol’s security systems that day, but makes no mention of the attempted overthrow of democracy that motivated and guided this tragedy.
Getting out of ideological ruts, with the help of facts, “maybe that’s an impossible goal,” says Gaines. Of course, those who dislike or dislike Donald Trump may have been persuaded that his behavior was even worse than they had imagined. But these people have already sanctioned the ex-president, ending his mandate and deeming him unfit to obtain a second one”.
The populist is hardly offended. In November, he officially launched his campaign for the 2024 presidential elections, even though a recent USA Today/Suffolk poll confirms a slump in his support among Republicans.
Despite the work of the commission of inquiry and the exposure of the fraud attempt piloted by Donald Trump against the elections, 61% of Republicans still believe in 2022 that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the presidential ballot of 2020, according to a Monmouth University poll released last September.