House impeachment managers emphasize the danger to Pence and other top officials in harrowing retelling of Jan. 6 attack
Impeachment,Donald Trump,Capitol Chaos,Politics
House impeachment managers on Wednesday led a rapt U.S. Senate on a harrowing retelling of the terror that engulfed the Capitol last month, sharing shocking new audio and video recordings of rioters declaring their intent to harm Vice President Mike Pence and other top officials — and showing how close they came to doing so.
The House Democrats, led by lead manager Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.), spent Day 2 of former president Donald Trump’s impeachment trial displaying violent video scenes of the Jan. 6 attack and the rioters’ relentlessly raw language, including chants to “hang” Pence and a sinister clip of a man looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asking, “Naaaancy? Where aaaare you, Nancy?”
All of it, the impeachment managers said, was a direct result of the president’s months-long effort to persuade his supporters of the “big lie” that the election had been stolen. After he had exhausted all other options to overturn President Biden’s victory, they said — including dozens of lawsuits and a sustained campaign to pressure state election officials — Trump turned his sights to Jan. 6, the day Congress was scheduled to formalize Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.
His supporters, the managers said, were heeding his calls with their violent plans to stop the vote count and even harm lawmakers.
Previously unpublished video shows Pence, Romney, Schumer and others rushing to evacuate the Capitol
“President Trump put a target on their backs,” said Stacey Plaskett, a Democratic House delegate from the Virgin Islands, describing the threat to lawmakers and Pence. “And his mob broke into the Capitol to hunt them down.”
Worse still, she and the other managers said, is that when lawmakers, Trump’s aides and even his family members implored the president to call off the rioters as the attack unfolded, he refused initially to do so — because, the managers argued, he hoped the mayhem would block the electoral vote count.
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