Washington, DC—Following the release of Rep. Barry Loudermilk’s report on the January 6 insurrection and the work of the bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) released the following statement.
“Donald Trump tried to overthrow the 2020 presidential election, which he lost by more than seven million votes and 306-232 in the Electoral College to President Joe Biden. As part of his effort to seize the presidency, he incited a violent insurrection which wounded nearly 150 police officers, many of whom are being treated to this day for physical and mental injuries, and many of whom were forced to leave their jobs because of full or partial disabilities incurred in the attacks. While the violent insurrection unfolded, Donald Trump—who told his followers at the Ellipse that they needed to ‘fight like hell’ or else they wouldn’t ‘have a country anymore,’ and ‘when you catch somebody in a fraud, you're allowed to go by very different rules’—watched the bloody combat unfold on TV from the safety of his Oval Office dining room and never called the National Guard, the Secretary of the Army, the Chief of the D.C. Police or any other police or military leader to mobilize an effective response to the mob he unleashed against Congress and his own vice president.
“Representative Loudermilk and Trump’s other loyal foot soldiers in Congress willfully ignore the findings of the bipartisan January 6 Select Committee report—for example, Loudermilk attempts to revive a long-debunked conspiracy theory that Trump pressed for a National Guard presence ahead of January 6, ignoring the sworn testimony of Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller stating that there was ‘no order’ from Trump to put 10,000 troops on the ready. If Trump dropped a passing mention of that number in conversation, thinking that it would somehow immunize him from the consequences of his treachery and disloyalty to the Republic, he is badly mistaken. If he casually remarked to an underling or anyone else about the forces that would be needed to stop his own attack on our government, this only deepens his culpability and consciousness of guilt—it does not erase it.
“As for other specious claims that the January 6 Select Committee suppressed evidence, as this publicly available letter explains, the Committee was obligated to return certain Secret Service transcripts to DHS for a review so DHS could redact sensitive security information and ensure Privacy Act compliance. This was an express condition the Committee was required to accept to obtain the testimony of these individuals, as Secret Service attorneys present in interviews repeatedly stressed. In the letter, the Committee specifically recommended DHS to provide the transcripts to the National Archives, where they would be included in the historical record of the investigation and be publicly available.
“Donald Trump did nothing to stop the violence he unleashed against us simply because he wanted it to proceed. Even then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy knew that; in the midst of the violent attack, he called Trump from his office begging him to call off the mob and Trump simply said, ‘Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.’
“No amount of Orwellian whitewashing or revisionism can hide the truth from the American people: the events culminating in the January 6 insurrection were an effort by Trump to overturn the 2020 election and seize the presidency. They were an open threat to American constitutional democracy and an affront to the rule of law. Donald Trump incited the insurrection and did nothing to come to the aid of the Congress or the Vice President until it was already clear his bloody insurrection would fail.”
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