After more than a year and a half of investigation, the January 6 committee released its full report on Thursday, finding that former president Donald Trump and his allies are guilty of offenses against the United States for their roles in inciting the Capitol riot and seeking to disrupt the orderly transition of power.
Among the crimes the panel contends Trump committed are obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., making a false statement, and inciting an insurrection, the last of which could disqualify Trump from holding public office in the future. Trump recently announced his third presidential bid.
The Justice Department must now assess whether sufficient evidence exists to pursue Trump’s prosecution.
The 845-page report’s executive summary concludes, “The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, former President Donald Trump.”
The committee estimated that between the November 2020 election and the January 6 Capitol riot, Trump and members of his inner circle “engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation.”
“Beginning election night and continuing through January 6th and thereafter, Donald Trump purposely disseminated false allegations of fraud related to the 2020 Presidential election in order to aid his effort to overturn the election and for purposes of soliciting contributions. These false claims provoked his supporters to violence on January 6th,” the committee writes.
The report adds that Trump “sought to corrupt the U.S. Department of Justice by attempting to enlist Department officials to make purposely false statements and thereby aid his effort to overturn the Presidential election.” The panel alleges that “after that effort failed, Donald Trump offered the position of Acting Attorney General to Jeff Clark knowing that Clark intended to disseminate false information aimed at overturning the election.”
The report goes on to accuse Trump of overseeing an effort to “obtain and transmit false electoral certificates to Congress and the National Archives.”
Trump’s failure to call off the mob on January 6 “perpetuated the violence at the Capitol and obstructed Congress’s proceeding to count electoral votes,” the report says.
Some Republican critics of the committee’s findings have argued that it failed to establish a criminally actionable connection between Trump and the violence that erupted on January 6. On that day in 2021, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol with the intention of halting the certification of the 2020 election for Democrat Joe Biden, then the president-elect. About 150 police officers were injured during the chaos, the New York Times reported in October. At least 964 people have been charged for their involvement in the riot, according to Business Insider.
Trump’s tweets in the direct aftermath of the incident were deemed inflammatory by Twitter, which banned him from the platform. The platform’s new CEO, Elon Musk, reinstated his account in November.
The non-incitement charges the committee recommended for Trump relate to his team’s use of attorney John Eastman’s flawed legal theory that then-vice president Mike Pence had the authority to refuse to count electoral votes and overturn the outcome for Trump. Eastman also received a criminal referral on those two counts from the committee.
In June, the committee’s chairman, Bennie Thompson, told CNN that the panel had ruled out making a formal criminal referral against Trump.
“That’s not our job,” he said at the time. “Our job is to look at the facts and circumstances around January 6, what caused it, and make recommendations after that.”
On Monday, the committee ultimately did issue a criminal referral, a nonbinding recommendation by Congress to the Justice Department to open an investigation. In compiling its report, the committee relied on 1,000 interviews as well as retrieved records including emails, texts, and phone records.
The committee also voted to refer four Republican lawmakers, including House minority leader Kevin McCarthy and Representatives Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, and Andy Biggs, to the House Ethics Committee over their refusal to honor the panel’s subpoenas.
Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger were the only Republicans on the nine-seat panel. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked the two anti-Trump Republicans after House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy boycotted the committee. McCarthy had originally proposed members who sympathized with the former president and his stolen-election narrative, namely Jordan and Jim Banks, but Pelosi quickly rejected those choices.