(Washington) The commission of inquiry into the assault on the Capitol examines on Tuesday the pressure of ex-president Donald Trump on the local elected officials of certain key American states to overturn the result of the November 2020 poll, which had carried ruling Democrat Joe Biden.
Posted at 11:08 a.m.
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, is expected to testify about a phone call with Donald Trump in which the president asked him to “find” nearly 12,000 ballots in his name, enough to catch up on Joe Biden in this Republican-controlled southern state.
Repeating accusations of fraud, of which he has never provided proof and which have been swept away by the courts, the Republican billionaire justified his requests by his conviction that the election had been “stolen” from him.
But Brad Raffensperger did not give in. He then faced threats, like other state election officials, and received police protection.
Rusty Bowers, Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, is also expected to testify about the pressure exerted by the former President, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ginni Thomas, Republican activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to overthrow the polling results in this conservative South West state.
“We’re going to show what the president’s role was in trying to convince states to nominate alternate voters,” Democratic commissioner Adam Schiff said on Sunday, referring to elected officials tasked with validating voters’ votes. .
In the American electoral system, it is these electors who designate the winner of the election in their states.
According to the commission, Donald Trump wanted to replace these great voters with some of his faithful by means of false certificates.
” Blessing ”
For this plan to work, the elected officials of the states concerned would have had to accept the new list of electors, according to Adam Schiff. “They didn’t and (Donald Trump’s team) continued to push anyway,” he added.
For more than a year, the commission of inquiry – made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans – has heard more than 1,000 witnesses, including two children of the former president, to shed light on the actions of Donald Trump before , during and after the event.
She could also summon ex-vice president Mike Pence to appear to question him about the numerous pressures exerted by Donald Trump to try to prevent him from certifying the victory of Joe Biden in the presidential election on January 6, 2021.
These pressures were at the center of the committee’s third hearing last Thursday.
This vote in Congress, in principle a mere formality, had been abruptly interrupted when thousands of supporters of Donald Trump, white-hot after a speech by the president, had stormed the seat of American democracy, plunging the country into the chaos for several hours.
“People need to take away from these hearings how involved the president was in the lead up to Jan. 6, how we got to a time when so many people attacked the Capitol because they honestly believed the election was stolen. “, explained Sunday Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans of the commission.
Donald Trump, who has never conceded defeat, again attacked the commission on Tuesday.
He denounced on social networks “political thugs who have criminalized justice at a level never seen before in our country”.