January 6 committee news – latest: Secret Trump letter demanded seizure of election ‘evidence’ to halt vote count

The FBI is still hunting for 350 suspects almost one year on from the attack on the US Capitol that killed five people and injured dozens of others.

Thursday will mark exactly one year since Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to try to stop the certification of electoral college votes for president Joe Biden. The former president had told his supporters beforehand to “march” on the home of Congress.

Around 800 rioters entered the building, attacking law enforcement officers and sending lawmakers fleeing for their lives. More than 725 people have been arrested and a few sentenced.

As many as 34 per cent of respondents agreed with the sentiment that it was sometimes “justified for citizens to take violent action against the government”.

Which was only a few percentage points higher than the share (29 per cent) who said they still believed that president Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election was illegitimate.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney said on Sunday that the House panel investigating 6 January had received eyewitness accounts about how the first family watched and reacted to the attack on Congress.

She told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos: “We are learning much more about what former president Trump was doing while the violent assault was underway,”

“The committee has firsthand testimony now that he was sitting in the dining room next to the Oval Office watching the attack on television as the assault on the Capitol occurred”.

While Mr Trump did not use the briefing room next door to the Oval Office to deliver such a message, he did go on to tweet that his supporters were “special” on 6 January.

Ms Cheney added on Sunday that “We know his daughter — we have firsthand testimony that his daughter Ivanka went in at least twice to ask him to ‘please stop this violence’”, citing an eyewitness.

“He could have told them to stand down. He could have told them to go home — and he failed to do so. It’s hard to imagine a more significant and more serious dereliction of duty than that.”

With the first anniversary of the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol looming, more than 700 people have been arrested for their alleged part in the most serious breach of the building since the War of 1812. Many are facing only minor charges, but others are in far more serious trouble – and among those already sentenced are some of the most familiar faces from the abundant footage of the day’s events.

As the hard work of identifying, arresting and prosecuting those involved in the riot continues, here’s what’s happened so far to some of the day’s most notorious figures.

The Democrats started planning a “contingency election” six months before the 2020 election, after realising that Donald Trump might try to steal the vote.

Maryland Rep Jamie Raskin, a Democrat who was closely involved in the attempted impeachment of the former president following the Capitol riot, said preparation began in May 2020 to prevent the election from being stolen.

In his new book Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and Trials of American Democracy, he writes: “Trump was going to steal the election and nothing was going to stop him – not the Electoral College vote, not the popular vote, not the law or the courts.”

“With that increasingly obvious plan in mind, we began to sketch out different scenarios for how Trump would work to bring about a constitutional crisis,” Mr Raskin adds.

Eric Garcia has more details:

Not long before the rioters broke into the Senate on 6 January 2021, the Republican congressman Greg Pence and his more famous brother – the then vice-president Mike Pence – were whisked away to safety by the Secret Service.

The 65-year-old Indiana representative has rarely spoken publicly about the events that day. But last July he said “couldn’t be prouder” of his brother’s actions.

There is the chance he could be asked to recount his experiences by the January 6 committee, whose members have said they will not give details about the individuals being called.

Rep. Pence voted twice against forming a committee to investigate the attack last year and also voted against impeaching Donald Trump.

In the year since the storming of the Capitol, the police department tasked with protecting the symbolic heart of American democracy has transformed.

After the attack, the leaders of the Capitol Police were dismissed over criticism of intelligence failures. Over the intervening months, the force’s funding has jumped by 15 per cent and people have a greater awareness of its role.

“It’s a sea change between this year and last year in terms of how the Capitol Police are thinking, and operating,” said Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Forum. “They’re going to be over-prepared, and willing to be criticized for being over-prepared.”

However, there is still fear in some quarters about the force’s ability to respond to another attack.

Former US Attorney Barabra McQuade said that Republican representative Jim Jordan could face jail time if he defies the 6 January committee.

In an interview with MSNBC, Ms McQuade said that “Jim Jordan doesn’t have a leg to stand on” if he defies the House select committee and refuses to talk if he is issued a subpoena.

She said: “This is absolutely a situation that’s unprecedented, subpoenaing a member of Congress. As a professional courtesy, they have first been requested to come forward, but if they continue to refuse, Chairman [Bennie] Thompson (D-MS) said they will use subpoenas if necessary.”

Ms McQuade added: “I imagine they will fight them, you know, asserting some of the same legal arguments we heard from others. But I think, if Congress wants this information, there is nothing in the law that prohibits them from issuing subpoenas to fellow members of Congress.”

She said that if Mr Jordan “at some point if he continues to fight, then the committee will demand that he come by issuing a subpoena. At that point his options are to be held in contempt, which can include jail time if he is prosecuted for that crime; so the same path that we have seen for Steve Bannon. So I think it is going to be difficult for him to manage, because unlike Steve Bannon, he’s an elected official.”

Rep Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, said that former vice president Mike Pence was a “hero” and a “patriot” on the day of the Capitol riots.

A member of the House select committee investigating the events of 6 January, Mr Raskin told CBS News that “on that day, he [Mike Pence] was a hero. And this is a guy who, I felt, went along with way too much during the Trump administration. But on that day, he was a constitutional patriot.”

Former president Donald Trump had attacked Mike Pence in a tweet and said that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify.”

Some Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol had also called for Mr Pence’s execution, chanting “hang Mike Pence.”

Kevin McCarthy, California Republican and House Minority leader accused the Democrats of using the Capitol riots as a “partisan political weapon to further divide our country.”

In a letter to the GOP, Mr McCarthy wrote: “As we have said from the start, the actions of that day were lawless and as wrong as wrong can be. Our Capitol should never be compromised and those who broke the law deserve to face legal repercussions and full accountability.”

He continued: “Unfortunately, one year later, the majority party seems no closer to answering the central question of how the Capitol was left so unprepared and what must be done to ensure it never happens again. Instead, they are using it as a partisan political weapon to further divide our country.”