Jamie Raskin

On Friday, December 18th, his team of outside advisers paid him a surprise visit. They proposed the immediate mass seizure of state election machines by the U.S. Military.

I remember from the second impeachment one of the most chilling pieces of film we saw was the people who raided told the police, we are here because the president told us to come here and invite us.

In fact, to try to stop the counting of electoral college votes in a presidential election he had lost. Absolutely unprecedented, nothing like that had ever happened before.

Donald Trump was, of course, the central figure who said everything into motion. He was the person, Rob, who identified January 6th as the date for a big protest. And he announced that in his tweet, in the middle of the night on December…

You might imagine that our Founders would have been shocked to learn that an American President would one day come to embrace and excuse political violence against our own institutions.

On January 6th, Trump knew the crowd was angry. He knew the crowd was armed. He sent them to the Capitol anyway.

He set off an explosive chain reaction amongst his followers.

When Donald Trump sent out his tweet, he became the first President ever to call for a crowd to descend on the Capital City to block the constitutional transfer of power.

Well, President Trump is still promoting the Big Lie about the election. How does it make you feel?

I fear for the world that they will inherit if we do not start holding these people to account.

If a President that is willing to try to instill and encourage to whip up a civil war amongst his followers using lies and deceit... what else is he going to do if he gets elected again?

I do fear for this next election cycle because who knows what that might bring.

What it was going to be was an armed revolution. I mean, people died that day.

That night, the Proud Boys engaged in violence on the streets of Washington and hurled aggressive insults at the police.

The Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers are two key groups that responded immediately to President Trump's call.

President Trump's tweet drew tens of thousands of Americans to Washington to form the angry crowd that would be transformed on January the 6th into a violent mob.

Never before in American history had a President called for a crowd to come contest the counting of electoral votes by Congress.

The Honorable Jamie Raskin, a Representative in Congress From the State of Maryland

Even an agreed-upon complete lack of evidence could not stop President Trump, Mark Meadows, and their allies from trying to overturn the results of a free and fair election.

Despite these grave concerns, Trump remained on the platform completely unchecked.

This hearing will be the moment when one sees both a convergence of efforts of a political coup with the insurrectionary mob violence.

Our investigation shows that there was a tremendous convergence of interests between the domestic violent extremist groups and the broader MAGA movement.

The Supreme Court is on an absolute reactionary rampage striking down reasonable modest gun safety laws like New York`s concealed carry law which we have an analogue to hear in Maryland, toppling more than a half-century of right to…

We`re in the fight of our lives here. And we`ve got to play hardball to defend our institutions. But we`re not going to go outside of the law to play their games.

Donald Trump knew that he had heavily armed followers in the crowd and in fact wanted to waive them in and take down the metal detector so they could blend in with the rest of the crowd.