Report: Trump lit the fire of Capitol insurrection

Washington, December 23

The House January 6 committee’s final report asserts that Donald Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol, concluding an extraordinary 18-month investigation into the former president and the violent insurrection two years ago.

Trump “lit that fire,” the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep Bennie Thompson, writes. The 814-page report released late on Thursday comes after the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, held 10 hearings and obtained more than a million pages of documents.

The witnesses — ranging from many of Trump’s closest aides to law enforcement to some of the rioters themselves — detailed Trump’s “premeditated” actions in the weeks ahead of the attack and how his wide-ranging efforts to overturn his defeat directly influenced those who brutally pushed past the police and smashed through the windows and doors of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The central cause was “one man,” the report says: Trump.

The massive, damning report comes as Donald Trump is running again for the presidency. — AP