Trump news: Rattled Trump lashes out as Jan 6 panel finishes investigation and tax return release looms

One major theme of the House select committee’s investigation into the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol is that Donald Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election, but still perpetuated the lie that it had been stolen from him.

It has come up in testimony, of which transcripts are now available, as well as being covered by the public hearings.

In the committee’s final report, there is a section that includes testimony from Trump aide Hope Hicks sharing an anecdote about former president Trump laughing about one of the crazier election fraud conspiracies propagated by lawyer Sidney Powell.

Read on:

As well as the actions of Donald Trump and his inner circle in the lead-up to January 6, the report also provides new details about the day itself – and the former president’s refusal to try to stop the insurrection.

When his supporters broke into the Capitol, Mr Trump watched it on TV and “did not contact a single top national security official during the day”.

“Not at the Pentagon, nor at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the F.B.I., the Capitol Police Department, or the D.C. Mayor’s office,” the report states, adding that he didn’t even try to contact Mr Pence to see if he was safe.

With no action coming from the head of state, the report revealed that the commander of the DC National Guard “strongly” considered going ahead and sending troops to the US Capitol without waiting for approval.

Major General William Walker was aware that doing so would mean he may have to resign from his role but, after waiting for hours with no order from officials, he considered doing it anyway, the report finds.

“Major General Walker himself understood he had to wait for approval from Secretary (Ryan) McCarthy to deploy his forces. But as he waited on that video call for hours, he did strongly consider sending them anyway,” the report states.

“He turned to his lawyer and said, ‘Hey, you know what? You know, we’re going to go, and I’m just going to shoulder the responsibility.’”

One of the most damning findings of the report was the extent that Mr Trump and his inner circle targeted election officials to try to get them to overturn the election results in his favour.

In the two months between election day and January 6, the group engaged in at least 200 separate acts of targeting and trying to influence officials.

Donald Trump has released a video calling on the incoming GOP House to obtain Joe Biden’s financial records accusing the president and his son Hunter of presiding over a “corrupt criminal enterprise”.

The former president is angry at the House Ways & Means Committee obtaining his tax returns and voting to release them, calling it a “deranged political witch hunt”. The returns are expected to be made public next week.

Mr Trump has fought to protect his tax returns from public view since he first stepped into the race to become the Republican nominee for president in 2015. Presidential candidates traditionally release their tax returns when they run for office and presidents are supposed to be audited annually by the IRS.

The report also revealed the identity of the Mr Trump ally who is accused of being the architect of the fake elector plot: Kenneth Chesebro.

Mr Chesebro, a little known attorney, allegedly led the plot – not Mr Trump’s attorney John Eastman who infamously created a step-by-step guide for how he claimed then-vice president Mike Pence could overturn the election.

“The fake elector plan emerged from a series of legal memoranda written by an outside legal advisor to the Trump Campaign: Kenneth Chesebro,” the report says.

“Although John Eastman would have a more prominent role in advising President Trump in the days immediately before January 6th, Chesebro—an attorney based in Boston and New York recruited to assist the Trump Campaign as a volunteer legal advisor—was central to the creation of the plan.”

The report states that Mr Trump “oversaw” the attempts to put forward fake electors to certify the results in his favour in seven states that Mr Biden won.

The panel describes how Mr Trump “spearheaded outreach aimed at numerous officials in States he lost but that had GOP-led legislatures, including in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona”.

Speaking to NBC News in a wide-ranging interview, Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell was sharply critical of former President Donald Trump and his influence on the party’s disappointing 2022 midterm results.

“Here’s what I think has changed: I think the former president’s political clout has diminished,” Mr McConnell said vowing to “actively look for quality candidates” in the 2024 electoral cycle and not defer to Mr Trump’s choices.

The senator said he is “less inclined to accept cards that may be dealt to us”.

“We can do a better job with less potential interference,” he said. “The former president may have other things to do.”

Mr McConnell also blamed Mr Trump for tarnishing the party’s image among crucial independent and swing voters, which cost the GOP a chance at the Senate majority through underperformance in “every state”.

“We lost support that we needed among independents and moderate Republicans, primarily related to the view they had of us as a party — largely made by the former president — that we were sort of nasty and tended toward chaos,” Mr McConnell told Sahil Kupar of NBC News. “And oddly enough, even though that subset of voters did not approve of President Biden, they didn’t have enough confidence in us in several instances to give us the majority we needed.”

As a result of the former president’s actions, the panel recommends that Donald Trump – who just last month announced his 2024 White House run – is barred from being able to enter office ever again.

The report points to part of the US Constitution which states that an individual who has taken an oath to support the Constitution but has “engaged in an insurrection” or given “aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution” can be disqualified from taking office.

The panel issued a grave warning about America’s future if Mr Trump and his inner circle are not held to account for their role in the insurrection.

“In the Committee’s judgment, based on all the evidence developed, President Trump believed then, and continues to believe now, that he is above the law, not bound by our Constitution and its explicit checks on Presidential authority. This recent Trump statement only heightens our concern about accountability,” the report states.

“If President Trump and the associates who assisted him in an effort to overturn the lawful outcome of the 2020 election are not ultimately held accountable under the law, their behavior may become a precedent and invitation to danger for future elections.

“A failure to hold them accountable now may ultimately lead to future unlawful efforts to overturn our elections, thereby threatening the security and viability of our Republic.”

Flight delayed? Train cancelled? Got some time on your hands?

Then you have time to read the full 845-page Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Download the full report here.

Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the House January 6 committee that an attorney paid by former president Donald Trump’s political organisation took great pains to pressure into testifying in a way that was favourable to the ex-president and his allies, including pushing her to say she didn’t recall things that might have been damaging to Mr Trump, working to find her employment while her testimony was being scheduled, and even relaying the substance of her testimony to the former president himself.

Andrew Feinberg reports on her testimony.

As political observers continue to crawl through the 845-page January 6 report, an apparently rattled former president Donald Trump has taken to Truth Social to post an angry, at-times all-caps conspiracy theory tirade aimed at the FBI and media for perpetrating election fraud against him.

Following on from his late-night response to the committee’s report, Mr Trump wrote that by using both social media and traditional media channels, the FBI had swung the election to Joe Biden by apparently getting millions of voters to change their minds leading to a 17 per cent swing against him.

Here comes the all-caps bit where he asks “honest and brave prosecutors and judges” to step up and “clean out this cancer which is destroying our great country!”

It seems a little odd that he accuses the government of the United States of using the FBI to cheat when he was leading the government at the time — something he repeats in the third post in which he says the outcome of the election has done terrible damage to the country and world over the last two years. He ends with a defiant: “TRUMP WON!”

The mood at Mar-a-Lago this weekend might be far from Christmassy.