Congressional report offers glimpse of how a defeated Donald Trump tried to keep power

WASHINGTON—It was throwback week on Capitol Hill, with everyone’s favourite legislative landmark sporting a retro-2021 look: surrounded by tall fencing, patrolled by armed soldiers.

During the State of the Union, three helicopters hovered over the marble dome for more than three hours, disrupting the sleep of neighbourhood children in the name of national security once again, a resident told me. It brought back memories of a year ago, after the Trump-inspired insurrectionist riot of Jan. 6, 2021, when the neighbourhood and the nation’s seat of government was visibly, forcibly locked down.

The anticipated threat for this year, a Canadian-inspired convoy that would blockade D.C., failed to materialize almost completely. A stage set up on the National Mall to host the much-hyped trucker protest sitting empty and the planned big truck motorcade from California reportedly called off shortly after it got underway because it didn’t attract enough vehicles to even call a convoy.

Still, the flashbacks to Jan. 6, 2021 didn’t stop there. The Justice Department and the congressional committee investigating the events of that day filed paperwork Wednesday revealing more details of the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and block the peaceful transfer of power. The filing demonstrates momentum toward legal accountability for that day.

The congressional investigators’ filing offered a glimpse of the actions taken behind closed doors, as directed by then-president Donald Trump. It highlights the meetings and messages to promote a scheme to get Trump-friendly states to invalidate their electoral college votes, and to lean aggressively on then-vice president Mike Pence to block the certification of the legitimate votes.

The investigators say their evidence shows Trump and his team knew the election results were legitimate and they conspired to overturn them anyway. Recently Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr published a tell-all book that makes the same point: in an excerpt published Thursday in the Wall Street Journal, Barr details a White House meeting in which he told Trump point-blank, “The fact is, we have looked at the major claims your people are making, and they are bullsh-.”

Even while the riot at the Capitol was underway, openly threatening Pence’s life, the filing from the investigators shows a member of Trump’s legal team leaning on Pence and his advisers to consider committing “one more minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act by adjourning the proceeding without certifying the vote. A Pence adviser wrote back, “Thanks to your bullsh-, we’re now under siege.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s announcement of a plea deal Wednesday shows how the plan to prevent the transfer of power, was playing out on Jan. 6, 2021. A member of the Oath Keepers group agreed to plead guilty to a charge of seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding. In the plea deal, Joshua James — who was seen Jan. 5 and 6, 2021 acting as a bodyguard and chauffeur to the convicted-and-then-pardoned Trump adviser Roger Stone — admits to participating in a plan to use force to prevent the transfer of power after the November 2020 election. That plan included amassing firearms in Washington and making preparations to use “lethal force” against anyone who tried to remove Trump from office, “including the National Guard or other government actors.”

James’s plea agreement secures his co-operation in the cases of his alleged co-conspirators.

Both developments show the progress of the legal process trying to reckon with the attempt to overturn the election. Plenty of those who participated directly in the ransacking of the Capitol are moving toward their day in court (the first actual trial of a participant began in D.C. this week). It’s possible Trump or people close to him may eventually face charges — the congressional investigators claim they now have a “good-faith basis for concluding” the president engaged in a “criminal conspiracy.” But they do not have the power to press criminal charges. If they think such charges are warranted after their investigation issues its final report, likely in June, they will refer their evidence to the attorney general. No former president in U.S. history has ever been charged with a crime.

But this week’s revelations hardly change anything about the politics of Jan. 6. So much as there are new details, the general outlines of what is alleged were already known. More than that, they are pretty much agreed to by all parties.

Trump claimed the election was fraudulent and that he should not have to leave office. He tried to convince states to refuse to certify the results, and he tried to convince his vice-president to refuse to allow Congress to certify them. He convened a massive rally and sent his supporters to march on the Capitol to stop the certification. Well after the riot, he’s claimed Pence should have “overturned” the election — his word — and has claimed that the insurrectionists were justified. He’s suggested that if he’s re-elected he will pardon them.

This is the case against him, and it is pretty much also his defence. Outside the fine details, the only real point of dispute is the legitimacy of the election result itself. Though every piece of so-called evidence Trump has produced over more than a year of making his claims has been shot down and thoroughly discredited, he continues to insist on those claims, and in his eyes they justify all the rest. And while congressional Republican leaders would like to forget all of it and move on, a substantial chunk of American Republicans believe it.

It isn’t just the fences and guards this week that recalled the early days of the post-Trump era. The dangerously polarized politics and mutually exclusive understandings of reality that led to the riot have barely changed.