Jan. 6 committee delivers whopping final report: Coup was planned months in advance [View all]

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Jan. 6 committee delivers whopping final report: Coup was planned months in advance
Trump's team had "fake electors" scheme lined up well before the election, panel finds in 845-page final report

By HEATHER DIGBY PARTON
Columnist
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 23, 2022 9:44AM (EST)


(Salon) The final report of the House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack, all 845 pages of it, is now in the public realm. It was released late on Thursday, so I won't claim to have read it all thoroughly in one night. But unlike the last highly anticipated event like this, Robert Mueller's ill-fated report, we are already familiar with the outlines of what it contains — and there was no Trump official, à la Bill Barr, spinning it for him in advance. So we are in a better position to judge the evidence for ourselves,

The report follows roughly the same organization as the committee hearings that began last summer, but with much richer detail. Those hearings rarely lasted longer than a couple of hours and were tightly scripted. That was probably the most effective strategy and certainly made for gripping TV. But the story of what happened in the aftermath of the 2020 election, as Donald Trump convinced most of his party and tens of millions of Americans that up was down and black was white, is a byzantine tale you can't truly absorb until you see it revealed in all its bizarre particulars.

The report is organized in eight chapters:

1. The Big Lie
2. "I Just Want to Find 11,780 Votes"
3. Fake Electors and the "President of the Senate Strategy"
4. "Just Call it Corrupt and Leave the Rest to Me"
5. "A Coup in Search of a Legal Theory"
6. "Be There, Will Be Wild!"
7. 187 Minutes of Dereliction
8. Analysis of the Attack

I'm pretty sure anyone who has been paying attention knows exactly which aspects of the coup plot those chapters are about.

Let's take one detail in Chapter 2 which validates reporting that Trump and his cronies were plotting the coup even before the election. Trump had been publicly indicating for months that he planned to contest the election if he came up short. In truth, that was his right, although there was no evidence of electoral fraud. But they weren't just talking about legal challenges to the election results — which Trump's team pursued, losing virtually all of them and failing to change the outcome anywhere. In fact, Trump's inner circle had been plotting for months to unconstitutionally overturn the election through the "fake elector" scheme. ..........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2022/12/23/jan-6-committee-delivers-whopping-final-report-coup-was-planned-months-in-advance/