Wednesday on MSNBC’s Deadline, radical Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the melodramatically-named House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack, stated falsely that former President Donald Trump and his “flunkies” were the “inner ring of the coup.”
Raskin said, “There was a mass demonstration, a wild demonstration called by Donald Trump that turned into a riot. Okay. That was the outer ring of activity. The middle ring are of activity was the insurrection itself, and that was the Proud Boys, The Oath Keepers, The Three Percenters, the militia groups, the 1st Amendment Praetorian, a bunch of organized violent extremist groups that were training for battle that broke our windows and began the assaults on the police officers that the rioters filled in on.”
Fact checks: 1) the pro-Trump demonstration was peaceful; 2) Trump repeatedly called for peaceful protest; 3) there was no insurrection; 4) not one of the groups Raskin named are violent extremists.
He continued, “But the scariest part of the day was really the inner ring of the coup. And there, the whole point was to try to force Vice President Mike Pence to declare completely lawless powers to unilaterally reject and repudiate electoral college votes from Arizona, from Georgia, from Pennsylvania, and a handful of other states. The point there was to lower Joe Biden’s total in the electoral college of 306 to below 270. At that point, under the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, the whole contest is kicked into the House of Representatives for a so-called contingent election.”
Raskin concluded, “At that point, I think Trump would have been ready to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare something like martial law, call in the Natural Guard and pronounce himself a hero for putting down the violence and the insurrection that he had organized against us. That was the plan.”
This is a complete fantasy that leftists like Raskin have constructed to divert attention from their own fraudulent seizure of power in an illegitimate presidential election. There is zero evidence for any of his shameful, demagogic, wild claims. But when have Democrats ever needed evidence to push their agenda?