WASHINGTON - Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. The panel has been piecing together behind the scenes for months, and suggested that the House Jan. 6 committee's upcoming hearings will be dramatic and include explosive revelations.
The hearings will tell a story that will blow the roof off the House, Raskin said Thursday at Georgetown University's Center on Faith and Justice in Washington.
The committee's members plan to hold those hearings in June and aim to have a report out about their investigation by the end of the summer or early fall, according to Raskin, who sits on the panel.
He said that no president has come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to orchestrate an inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order. And then use a violent insurrection made of domestic violent extremist groups, white nationalist and racist, fascist groups to support the coup. Raskin said the committee will present evidence that shows there was coordination between then-President Donald Trump and his inner circle and his supporters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 in an attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The plan was to use then-Vice President Mike Pence to try to get President Joe Biden's electoral vote tally below the 270 majority needed for victory, according to Raskin. Under the 12th Amendment, the contest would be moved to a vote in the House. If that happens, Republicans would have the majority to take over the presidency, because the votes would be cast by the state delegations, and the GOP controls more state delegations than the Democrats do.
It is anyone's guess what could have happened - martial law, civil war. Raskin said that the plan was the beginning of authoritarianism, and speculating on what might have unfolded if it was successful. I want people to pay attention to what's going on here because that's as close to Fascism as I want my country to come to again. Raskin said that this was not a coup directed at the president. It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and the Congress. The plan was coordinated most closely by Trump and his inner circle, and Raskin said that the committee faced the most difficulty in this aspect of its investigation. The panel interviewed more than 800 witnesses, but he said that the closer you get to Trump, the more they refuse to testify. Raskin said about the threats to Pence on January 6 and the chants by rioters to hang him, the vice president's Secret Service agents, including one who was carrying nuclear football, ran down to an unidentified place in the Capitol. The agents who Raskin said he suspects were reporting to Trump's Secret Service agents were trying to whisk Pence away from the Capitol.
Pence then uttered what I think are the six most chilling words of this entire thing I've seen so far: ''I'm not getting into that car, Raskin said.
Raskin said that he knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned to do.