Page:Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/326

 decided and certified by the States. It was the Vice President and Congress's job to open and count the legitimate electoral college votes.

And in the early morning hours of January 7th, after a day unlike any seen in American history, when a mob of angry insurrectionists attempted to violently upend a Presidential election, the Vice President and Members of Congress, shaken but steady, delayed but resolute, regrouped and reconvened and did their Constitutional duty to certify Joseph R. Biden as the next President of the United States.

President Trump's plot to pressure State legislators to overturn the vote of the electoral college failed—but only barely. Even so, the consequences of President Trump's efforts to overturn State election results were significant.

Many of the people who refused to be pushed into manipulating election results—governors, secretaries of State, State legislators, State and local election officials, and frontline election workers just doing their jobs— found themselves subjected to public demonization and subsequent spamming, doxing, harassment, intimidation, and violent threats. Some of the threats were sexualized or racist in nature and targeted family members. President Trump never discouraged or condemned these tactics, and in fact he was an active participant in directing his supporters, through tweets and speeches, to apply pressure to public servants who would not comply.

President Trump and his team were not above using incendiary rhetoric or threats to achieve their goal of overturning the election. Giuliani said so before the purported hearing in Michigan in December. Recall that he told an online audience, there's "nothin' wrong with putting pressure on your state legislators" and "you have got to get them to remember that their oath to the Constitution sometimes requires being criticized. Sometimes it even requires being threatened."

That pressure came privately and publicly in the post-election period.

Privately, for example, President Trump called Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey three times after their White House meeting: November 21st, November 25th, and December 14th. Shirkey did not recall many specifics of those calls and claimed he did not remember the President applying any specific pressure. The day after one of those calls, however, Shirkey tweeted that "our election process MUST be free of intimidation and threats," and "it's inappropriate for anyone to exert pressure on them." From this and other public statements, it is clear that Shirkey was sensitive to outside forces pressuring people with roles in the