Trump brought US ‘dangerously close to catastrophe’, January 6 panel says

By Dilip -

The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol presented evidence on Thursday that Donald Trump was told his last-gasp attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election was unlawful but forged ahead anyway. Trump then pressured his vice-president, Mike Pence, to reject a tally of state electors as part of a plot that brought the country “dangerously close to catastrophe”, the panel heard.

With live witnesses and recorded depositions from its yearlong investigation, the panel offered a dramatic accounting of the days and hours that preceded the assault. Chilling new evidence also detailed the frantic moments after rioters stormed the Capitol, as Pence was rushed from the Senate chamber to a secure underground location. “Approximately 40 feet – that’s all there was – 40 feet between the vice-president and the mob,” said the California congressman Pete Aguilar, a Democrat who led the panel’s third hearing. “Make no mistake about the fact that the vice-president’s life was in danger.”

The committee spent the majority of the hearing dissecting the “completely nonsensical and antidemocratic” theory, devised by the conservative law professor John Eastman and embraced by Trump, that suggested Pence had the authority to reverse the results of the 2020 election. The vice-president has no such power…..

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/16/jan-6-panel-reveal-new-evidence-pressure-from-trump-put-mike-pence-danger


Donald Trump's gift to America: Realizing we've never been a liberal democracy. By PAUL ROSENBERG


The Break-Up of Britain / The US today resembles the Soviet Union just before it fell


In 1953, the Republican Party overthrew the Iranian Government; in 2021 it used the same techniques against the elected US President


Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise


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