Donald Trump retaliated to the charges pressed against him over the attack on Capitol Hill and accused the House lawmakers on Monday of ‘fake charges’ to prevent him from running for the White House again.
“The Fake charges made by the highly partisan Unselect Committee of January 6th have already been submitted, prosecuted, and tried in the form of Impeachment Hoax #2,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. “I WON convincingly,” said the former President, according to the news agency AFP.
“This whole business of prosecuting me is just like impeachment was — a partisan attempt to sideline me and the Republican Party,” he added.
The comments come on the backdrop of the US House of Representatives panel probing the 2021 attack on the Capitol suggested federal prosecutors charge Trump with four crimes, including obstruction and insurrection, for his role in sparking the deadly riot, reported news agency Reuters.
Donald Trump Should Face Insurrection, Obstruction Charges: US Capitol Riot Panel
The committee asked the Justice Department to charge Trump with four potential felonies: obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements, and aiding or inciting an insurrection.
“An insurrection is a rebellion against the authority of the United States. It is a grave federal offense, anchored in the Constitution itself,” Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democratic select committee member, said as he announced the charges.
It is for the first time that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution after the Democratic-led select committee suggestions to the Justice Department were marked by more than 1,000 witness interviews and the collection of hundreds of thousands of documents.
However, the request does not force federal prosecutors to act. The suggestions come amid a special counsel overseeing two other federal probes of Trump related to the Republican’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election defeat and the removal of classified files from the White House.
In a fiery speech delivered to his supporters near the White House on January 6, 2021, Trump publicly chastised his vice president, Mike Pence for not going along with his scheme to reject ballots cast in favor of Democrat Joe Biden. Trump then waited hours to make a public statement as thousands of his supporters raged through the Capitol assaulting police and threatening to hang Pence.
It was the last public gathering of the nine-member panel that spent 18 months probing the unprecedented attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power by thousands of Trump backers, inspired by his false claims that his 2020 election loss to Biden was the result of widespread fraud.