Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/125

 was impeached on January 13, 2021, or when he was tried by the Senate in February of that year. Fifty-seven of 100 Senators voted to convict President Trump at that time, and more than 20 others condemned the President's conduct and said they were voting against conviction because the President's term had already expired. At the time, the Republican Leader of the U.S. Senate said this about Donald Trump: "A mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him. It was obvious that only President Trump could end this. He was the only one who could." House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who spoke directly with President Trump during the violence of January 6th, expressed similar views both in private and in public. Privately, Leader McCarthy stated: "But let me be very clear to you and I have been very clear to the President. He bears responsibility for his words and actions. No if, ands or buts." In public, Leader McCarthy concluded: "The President bears responsibility for Wednesday's attack on Congress by mob rioters."

Today we know that the planning to overturn the election on January 6th was substantially more extensive, and involved many other players, and many other efforts over a longer time period. Indeed, the violent attack and invasion of the Capitol, and what provoked it, are only a part of the story.

From the outset of its hearings, the Committee has explained that President Trump and a number of other individuals made a series of very specific plans, ultimately with multiple separate elements, but all with one overriding objective: to corruptly obstruct, impede, or influence the counting of electoral votes on January 6th, and thereby overturn the lawful results of the election. The underlying and fundamental feature of that planning was the effort to get one man, Vice President Mike Pence, to assert and then exercise unprecedented and lawless powers to unilaterally alter the actual election outcome on January 6th. Evidence obtained by the Committee demonstrates that John Eastman, who worked with President Trump to put that and other elements of the plan in place, knew even before the 2020 Presidential election that Vice President Pence could not lawfully refuse to count official, certified electoral slates submitted by the Governors of the States. Testimony and contemporaneous documentary evidence also indicate that President Trump knew that the plan was unlawful before January 6th. When the Vice President's counsel wrote to Eastman on January 6th to ask whether the latter had informed the President that the Vice President did not have authority to decide the election unilaterally, Eastman responded: "He's been so advised," and added, "[b]ut you know him—once he gets something in his head, it is hard to get him to change course."