Trump complains Jan 6 committee is ignoring him

Mr Trump is irate because the select committee has not responded to a statement that is rife with the same lies that were debunked at Monday’s hearing

(REUTERS)

Former president Donald Trump on Wednesday lashed out at the House January 6 select committee for failing to respond to his 12-page statement on the hearings.

The former president shared the rambling response in response to revelations that some of his closest advisers rejected his claims the 2020 election wasn’t fair.

In a post on his own Truth Social platform, Mr Trump wrote: “The Unselect Committee has been unable [to] answer, or in any way refute, the detailed statement, put out yesterday, of voter fraud and irregularities in numerous states that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election”.

In the “detailed statement” he referenced, Mr Trump accused the panel of “disgracing everything we hold sacred about our Constitution” with a “a smoke and mirrors show,” and said news organisations that broadcast the hearing had “coordinated” with the select committee to “broadcast their witnesses on national television without any opposition, cross-examination, or rebuttal evidence”.

In turn, he accused Democrats of having “illegally inflated voter rolls, illegally allow[ing] harvested and stuffed ballots, abus[ing] the use of mail-in ballots, physically remov[ing] Republicans from counting facilities, abus[ing] the elderly in nursing homes, brib[ing] election officials with donations, stopp[ing] counting on Election Night, [giving] Democrats three extra days to harvest ballots, and demand[ing] that the American people believe it was legitimate”

None of the accusations have ever been proven.

Mr Trump also repeated allegations laid out in a film by Dinesh D’Souza, 2000 Mules, which argues that Democrats used “mules” to deliver illicit ballots from liberal non-profits to ballot drop boxes.

Multiple legitimate news organisations have debunked the allegations offered in the film, and Mr Trump’s own ex-attorney general, William Barr, has dismissed them as nonsense. Mr Barr even laughed audibly during videotaped testimony when select committee aides questioned him on the conspiracy theory around which the film is centred.

The select committee is in the midst of a series of hearings in which the nine-member panel plans to lay out its’ preliminary findings after a year of investigating the “facts, circumstances, and causes” of the 6 January 2021 pro-Trump riot which claimed the lives of three police officers and injured hundreds more.

The panel of seven Democrats and two Republicans plans to hold six hearings, the next of which is set to take place Thursday at 1.00 pm.

The hearing will examine the pressure campaign Mr Trump mounted in hopes of pushing then-vice president Mike Pence to unilaterally reject electoral votes from swing states during the joint session of Congress held for the purpose of certifying the presidential election.