Former President Donald Trump should face criminal charges, including insurrection over Capitol riot.
This is parts of the findings of a congressional investigation into last year’s Capitol riot.
The Democratic-led committee voted overwhelmingly for the justice department to pursue Mr Trump.
The panel also showed a new video of former Trump staffer Hope Hicks warning Trump about his legacy.
On January 6, 2021, Trump supporters stormed Congress, disrupting Joe Biden’s certification as president.
Mr Trump, who denies any wrongdoing, released a statement condemning the panel as a “kangaroo court”.
After spending around 18 months investigating the riot, the House of Representatives select committee recommended at their final meeting on Monday that Mr Trump face four charges:
· Inciting, assisting, aiding or comforting an insurrection
· Obstruction of an official proceeding
· Conspiracy to defraud the United States
· Conspiracy to make a false statement
The Justice Department, whose prosecutors are already considering whether to charge Mr Trump, is not required to act on a recommendation from a congressional committee.
While the panel’s actions are primarily symbolic, the chairman described the proposed charges as a “roadmap to justice”.
On Monday, a Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment on the referral.
“An insurrection is a rebellion against the authority of the United States,” said congressman Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who serves on the committee.
“It is a grave federal offence, anchored in the Constitution itself.”
On Monday, the panel’s seven Democrats and two Republicans released a preliminary 161-page executive summary.
It accused Mr Trump of a “multi-part conspiracy” to defy the will of voters in the run-up to the Capitol violence and during the unrest itself.
According to the House committee, Mr. Trump circulated false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen before lobbying state officials, the Justice Department, and his own vice president to help overturn his defeat. The panel accuses him of encouraging a riot in Congress as a last-ditch effort to prevent Mr Biden’s peaceful transition of power.
The full report, spanning hundreds of pages, is due to be released on Wednesday.
On Monday, the panel also published a fresh video from their deposition with longtime Trump staffer Hope Hicks, who said she told Mr Trump and his team that they were “destroying his legacy” by continuing to make false statements about the election.
Mr Trump had shrugged off her concern, she said.
The then-Republican president, she testified, “said something along the lines of, ‘Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose, so that won’t matter.
“‘The only thing that matters is winning.'”
The committee also criticised the president’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump, a former White House aide, for not being “forthcoming” with investigators.
Ms Trump and White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany “displayed a lack of full recollection of certain issues, or were not otherwise as frank or direct” as other aides to Mr Trump, the report said.
Mr Trump’s presidential campaign, which he launched last month, released a statement accusing the committee of holding “show trials by Never Trump partisans who are a stain on this country’s history”.
“This Kangaroo court has been nothing more than a vanity project that insults Americans’ intelligence and makes a mockery of our democracy.”
A Trump bust being held up during the day of the riot at the US Capitol.
The committee also said it would refer four Republican members of Congress to the House ethics committee, including Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, for failing to comply with the committee.
“If we are to survive as a nation of laws and democracy, this can never happen again,” said committee chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat.
“If the faith is broken, so is our democracy. Donald Trump broke that faith,” he added.
More than 900 people have been charged in relation to the Capitol riot.
BBC
