The committee’s final report included new details about weapons around the Capitol the day of the riot, Trump refusing calls to calm his supporters and more.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has released an introduction to its final report. The committee also held its final public meeting on Monday, during which it made criminal referrals to the Justice Department for former president Donald Trump and others.
That referral — essentially, the committee formally urging the agency to investigate and to explore possible charges — was expected, and requires no official action. The Justice Department is already pursuing its own investigation.
But the hearing and the first 160-plus pages of material do include some new details, as the committee lays out its case for what would be a historic prosecution of a former president. Below are some takeaways on what we have learned so far.
1. What’s in the four criminal referrals
It had already been anticipated that the committee would take this action. But until now, it hadn’t been clear which laws would be cited.
The committee made four criminal referrals against Donald Trump:
He added that the committee had also subpoenaed four members of Congress for information about Trump’s plans to overturn the election. None complied, so the committee referred them “for appropriate sanction by the House Ethics Committee.”
2. More evidence Trump resisted urging peace — even before Jan. 6
The committee has repeatedly pointed to Trump not only being negligent on Jan. 6, but perhaps approving of the violence that day (or at least perceiving some advantage in it). And the final report adds more details on that front.
Specifically, it says that:
This builds on what we’d already learned about Trump’s attitude to the riot as violence unfolded. Both Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.) and former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney have said that Trump lamented that members of Congress weren’t as upset as the mob. White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson has testified that Trump was aware that people who attended his speech before the riot were armed, before he told them to march to the Capitol anyway. And White House aide Sarah Matthews has said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told her that Trump didn’t want to call on the rioters to be peaceful — though he was ultimately convinced by his daughter, Ivanka Trump.
All of it would seem to confirm negligence, at the very least. And according to the report, Trump’s refusal to call for peace not only lasted hours into the riot; it also began earlier than previously had been known, in the days leading up to it.
3. New details on hundreds of weapons
Those who have cast doubt on whether the attack on the Capitol was truly an “insurrection” have argued that, if it were, there would have been more weapons. But that conceit ignored that most of the people who rioted weren’t apprehended at the time, so we didn’t really know how many people were armed.
And now the committee’s report reveals that plenty of weapons were indeed seized at the magnetometers outside Trump’s Jan. 6 speech on the Ellipse, before the riot.
Specifically, the report cites a November 2021 document produced by the Capitol Police and says: “Secret Service confiscated a haul of weapons from the 28,000 spectators who did pass through the magnetometers: 242 canisters of pepper spray, 269 knives or blades, 18 brass knuckles, 18 tasers, 6 pieces of body armor, 3 gas masks, 30 batons or blunt instruments, and 17 miscellaneous items like scissors, needles, or screwdrivers.”
And these were just the people who submitted to going through a magnetometer.
