The January 6 commission focuses on Trump’s pressures and threats to various officials so that they would not certify Biden’s victory | International

The phrase lives up to the great milestones in the history of American presidential infamy, from Richard Nixon (“I am not a thief”) to Bill Clinton (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky”). This was pronounced by Donald Trump on January 2, 2021 during a call to the secretary of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger: “I just need to find”, began the still president, before hesitating for a second: “eh, 11,780 votes; that is, one more than we have [de diferencia]. Because we won in the State”. Four days later, Trump recalled again at a rally in Washington, before thousands of his supporters, that it was only a matter of finding a handful of votes in Georgia. Later, hundreds of those supporters stormed the Capitol and violently interrupted for the first time in US history the transfer of power to Joe Biden, who had won the November elections.

A year and a half has passed. And in the fourth session of conclusions of the investigation of the events of January 6, held this Tuesday in a solemn room of the United States Congress, that phrase resonated again, and to the anthology of the attack on the Capitol there was no choice but to add another: “We have a lot of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”

Rudy Giulianni, a former New York mayor and Trump adviser, told Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, as he has testified. The phrase shows, according to the nine members of the commission (nine Democrats and two Republicans), that Trump and his people personally pressured, despite the lack of evidence, local officials in charge of certifying electoral votes in states such as Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia, where they tried to use them to deny the Democratic victory so that the 45th president could stay in power. It also proves for the committee that these pressures led to threats, which came to be death, by supporters of the former president against those Republican officials.

The commission’s vice chair, Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, asked those present to take into account the revelations of the previous hearings (“Remember what you knew when you made those calls,” she added), during which they provided evidence that Trump tried to “relentlessly” force Mike Pence to overthrow a legitimate electoral result, despite the fact that it was “illegal and unconstitutional” since he knew that it was not in his power to do so, and that his closest advisers and members of his family They repeated over and over again to the tycoon that his suspicions of electoral fraud were baseless.

“First he filed lawsuits to get them to agree with him in court,” said Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and the member of the commission who has taken center stage today and has carried the weight of the questioning of witnesses. “When he saw that he didn’t get it [de las 62 querellas que se interpusieron, solo le dieron la razón en una, y el nuevo recuento no afectó al resultado], began lobbying individual state legislators. He and his allies blatantly violated multiple federal laws by participating in this plot, including conspiring to defraud the United States,” Schiff added in another veiled message sent directly to the Justice Department, which the commission is serving on a weekly basis. evidence for them to take legal action against Trump, which is not clear that they will ever come.

The conversation with Raffensperger, who revealed in his day The Washington Post, It has been, obviously, one of the strong points of the audience. Including, of course, the famous phrase. The Georgia secretary of state has told the commission that “there were no votes to seek.”

“The numbers are the numbers, and the numbers don’t lie”, he repeated several times during his testimony, in which those present could not help but laugh when a part of that recording was played in which Raffensperger, who seemed flustered by the tone of the conversation, he offers to send a link (link) to the then president to verify that the calculations were correct in Georgia. To which Trump, who insisted that he had won the state by 400,000 votes, so it couldn’t be that hard to find 11,000, replied: “I’m not interested in your link. I have a much better link!”

Schiff asked the witness why he decided to continue with his work in the midst of those pressures and threats that he and his family received in those days. Raffensperger shrugged it off, saying: “I think sometimes you need to stand up and hold your own, do your job. That was all we did. Stay on the side of the law and the Constitution.”

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