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Trump Election Claims in Focus as Committee Holds January 6 Riot Hearing

The panel investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol last year holds its second public hearing Monday, with former President Donald Trump’s campaign manager among those testifying in a session focusing on Trump’s unfounded allegations of election fraud. 

Committee members said Sunday much more evidence will emerge in upcoming hearings that Trump knew he had lost his bid for reelection and yet fomented the mayhem by telling supporters he had been cheated out of another four-year term. 

Trump “absolutely knew he had lost,” U.S. Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, told CNN’s “State of the Union” show. “Any reasonable person had to know he was spreading a big lie” by claiming, as he does to this day, that he won the November 2020 election over Democrat Joe Biden, who assumed the presidency two weeks after the attack on the Capitol. 

Raskin described Trump’s actions as encouraging “a massive attack on our democracy,” while California Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff, in a separate interview on ABC’s “This Week” show, said, “While this attack was going on, he did nothing to stop it” until hours after it started. 

Schiff contended that Trump engaged in a “dereliction of duty (by his) inactions that day” in not trying to call off the riot for more than two hours as his supporters rampaged through the Capitol, ransacking congressional offices and forcing lawmakers to flee the Senate and House of Representatives chambers for their own safety. 

Raskin and Schiff said the committee’s chairman, Democratic Congressman Bennie Thompson, and the panel’s vice-chairman, Republican Liz Cheney, only spelled out the broad outlines of the House investigative committee’s findings at last week’s opening hearing televised during prime-time evening hours. 

At least six more public hearings are planned over the next two weeks. 

“There’s no question the president formed the mob, the president incited the mob, the president addressed the mob. He lit the flame,” Cheney said in her opening statement last Thursday accusing Trump of illegally trying to upend the election result to stay in power and urging supporters to block lawmakers from certifying Biden’s victory. 

Trump, posting on his own TRUTH Social platform, called the committee hearing Thursday night a “one sided, totally partisan, POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” He dismissed a brief videotape of his elder daughter Ivanka testifying that she agreed with former Attorney General William Barr that there was no broad evidence of political fraud in the election and that Biden had won fairly. 

Trump said his daughter, a White House adviser to him, had “checked out” by the time vote recounts were being conducted. 

Cheney outlined the case against Trump much like a prosecutor might do in an opening statement at a criminal trial although the House committee can only spell out the case to the public, not bring charges against anyone. The panel could, if it chooses to do so, refer its findings and transcripts of the thousand or so witnesses it has interviewed to the Justice Department for its consideration on whether to charge anyone, including Trump, for planning and carrying out the riot. 

“The rule of law needs to apply equally to everyone,” Schiff said of Trump. “They need to be investigated if there is credible evidence and I believe there is. The president’s big lie (that he won the election) was in fact a big lie.” 

More than 800 supporters of Trump have already been charged in the mayhem inside the Capitol and more than 300 have pleaded guilty or been convicted, with the remaining cases still unresolved. Judges have sentenced some of the rioters facing such minor charges as trespassing to a few weeks in prison, but those who attacked police to barge into the Capitol have been imprisoned for four years or more. 

Raskin and Schiff said multiple Republican members of Congress sought pardons from Trump before he left office January 20, 2021, because they had supported his efforts to stay in office. Cheney said Congressman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania was one of them, but he denied it after she mentioned his name in her Thursday night statement. 

Raskin said the fact the lawmakers sought a Trump pardon, which he did not grant, showed “evidence of guilt or a fear they were culpable. The details will surface.” 

“Everything is based on facts,” Raskin said of the information that has yet to be made public by the investigative committee.
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Texas School Shooting Survivors Urge US Lawmakers to Pass Gun Control Measures

U.S. lawmakers are still struggling to reach a deal on gun control measures in the wake of last month’s mass shooting that left 21 dead at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. VOA Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson says Democrats are rallying to keep attention focused on the issue.
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House Passes Gun Control Bill After NY, Texas Deaths 

The House passed a wide-ranging gun control bill Wednesday in response to recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, that would raise the age limit for purchasing a semiautomatic rifle and prohibit the sale of ammunition magazines with a capacity of more than 15 rounds.

The legislation passed by a mostly party-line vote of 223-204. It has almost no chance of becoming law as the Senate pursues negotiations focused on improving mental health programs, bolstering school security and enhancing background checks. But the House bill does allow Democratic lawmakers a opportunity to frame for voters in November where they stand on policies that polls show are widely supported.

“We can’t save every life, but my God, shouldn’t we try? America, we hear you, and today in the House we are taking the action you are demanding,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, a Texas Democrat. “Take note of who is with you and who is not.”

The push comes after a House committee heard wrenching testimony from recent shooting victims and family members, including from Miah Cerrillo, 11, who covered herself with a dead classmate’s blood to avoid being shot at the Uvalde elementary school.

The cycle of mass shootings in the United States has rarely stirred Congress to act. But the shooting of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde has revived efforts in a way that has lawmakers from both parties talking about the need to respond.

“The answer is not to destroy the Second Amendment, but that is exactly where the Democrats want to go,” said Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican.

Senate action

The work to find common ground is mostly taking place in the Senate, where support from 10 Republicans will be needed to get a bill signed into law. Nearly a dozen Democratic and Republican senators met privately for an hour Wednesday in hopes of reaching a framework for compromise legislation by week’s end. Participants said more conversations were needed about a plan that is expected to propose modest steps.

In a measure of the political peril that efforts to curb guns pose for Republicans, five of the six lead Senate GOP negotiators do not face reelection until 2026. They are Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, John Cornyn of Texas, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. The sixth, Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, is retiring in January. It’s also notable that none of the six is seeking the Republican presidential nomination.

While Cornyn has said the talks are serious, he has not joined the chorus of Democrats saying the outlines of a deal could be reached by the end of this week. He told reporters Wednesday that he considers having an agreement before Congress begins a recess in late June to be “an aspirational goal.”

The House bill stitches together a variety of proposals Democrats had introduced before the recent shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde. The suspects in the shootings at the Uvalde school and Buffalo supermarket were both just 18, authorities say, when they bought the semiautomatic weapons used in the attacks. The bill would increase the minimum age to buy such weapons to 21.

“A person under 21 cannot buy a Budweiser. We should not let a person under 21 buy an AR-15 weapon of war,” said Representative Ted Lieu, a California Democrat.

Republicans have noted that a U.S. appeals court ruling last month found California’s ban on the sale of semiautomatic weapons to adults under 21 was unconstitutional.

“This is unconstitutional and it’s immoral. Why is it immoral? Because we’re telling 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds to register for the draft. You can go die for your country. We expect you to defend us, but we’re not going to give you the tools to defend yourself and your family,” said Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican.

Safe storage

The House bill also includes incentives designed to increase the use of safe gun storage devices and creates penalties for violating safe storage requirements, providing for a fine and imprisonment of up to five years if a gun is not properly stored and is subsequently used by a minor to injure or kill themselves or another individual.

It also builds on the Biden administration’s executive action banning fast-action “bump stock” devices and “ghost guns” that are assembled without serial numbers.

The House is also expected to approve a bill Thursday that would allow families, police and others to ask federal courts to order the removal of firearms from people who are believed to be at extreme risk of harming themselves or others.

Nineteen states and the District of Columbia currently have such “red flag laws.” Under the House bill, a judge could issue an order to temporarily remove and store the firearms until a hearing can be held no longer than two weeks later to determine whether the firearms should be returned or kept for a specific period.
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