elected officials recount the pressures of the Trump camp to invalidate the election of Joe Biden

Elections officials told the House of Inquiry Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday, June 21, how Donald Trump, his lawyers and his supporters threatened and harassed them for the push to ” to spill “ the result of the 2020 presidential election lost by the former Republican president to Democrat Joe Biden.

According to Republican elected Rusty Bowers, speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Mr. Trump’s claims about his victory in this conservative western state won by Joe Biden were “false”.

“Anyone who would say, anywhere and anytime, that I said the election was rigged, that would not be true”did he declare.

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The Republican billionaire justified his demands by his belief that the election had been his “volley” by repeating accusations of fraud, of which he has never provided proof and which have been swept away by the courts. The billionaire’s supporters stormed the US Congress to try to prevent the validation of the Democratic candidate’s victory, plunging the country into chaos for several hours.

“Many theories” but “no evidence”

Mr. Bowers also described as “false” the allegations of the lawyer of the ex-president, Rudy Giuliani, evoking “hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants and thousands of dead who had voted” for Joe Biden. Despite several requests, the boss of the elected Republicans of Arizona said he had no ” never “ saw the evidence for these allegations, citing a conversation with the former mayor of New York. “He said, ‘we have a lot of theories, we don’t have any evidence.’ And I don’t know if it was a blunder”.

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Mr. Bowers thus refused to convene the local assembly to invalidate the ballot, then to replace the electors elected, responsible for certifying the result of the vote, by supporters of Mr. Trump. He was then flooded with “over 20,000 emails and tens of thousands of phone calls and text messages.”

“It saturated our offices. We were unable to work, or at least communicate”said Russell Bowers, while demonstrators, sometimes threatening, gathered outside his home to insult him, he said, with tears in his eyes.

Mr. Trump’s legal team, however, went ahead with their client’s plan. Supporters of the billionaire, chosen as parallel voters in the key states won by Joe Biden, had overturned the result of the ballot by means of false certificates. But Vice President Mike Pence, who was presiding over the vote, resisted pressure from the White House to declare Donald Trump the winner.

“I just thought it was a tragic travesty”commented Rusty Bowers, who had voted for the billionaire in 2016 and supported him in 2020.

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“Professional scammers”

Brad Raffensperger, Secretary of State of Georgia, had for his part received a telephone call from Donald Trump during which the President had asked him to ” to find “ nearly 12,000 ballots in his name, enough to beat Joe Biden in the Republican-controlled Southern state. He had again mentioned electoral fraud and ballot box stuffing, charges dismissed by the courts.

But Brad Raffensperger did not give in. “Numbers are numbers and we couldn’t recount [les votes] because we made sure we checked every claim”he said Tuesday before the commission. “There were no ballots to be found, the account was accurate and it was certified”he pointed out.

Shaye Moss, a former Georgia election worker, and her mother (in the background), testify before the commission of inquiry, on Capitol Hill, June 21, in Washington.

He was also the target of harassment and threats, like Shaye Moss, a simple election agent from Atlanta who had participated in the counting of ballots on election night with his mother. Donald Trump had accused them by name of being “professional scammers”.

“It changed my life”she said on Tuesday, recounting with great emotion having received racist messages and death threats.

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For more than a year, the commission of inquiry – made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans – has heard more than a thousand witnesses, including two children of the former president, to shed light on the actions of Donald Trump before , during and after the January 6 attack.

The committee’s fifth hearing will take place on Thursday, and will look into the president’s efforts to pressure the Justice Department to stay in power. Donald Trump, who has never conceded his defeat in the presidential election, denounced on Tuesday on social networks “political thugs who have criminalized justice on a level never seen before in our country”.

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Le Monde with AFP and Reuters

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