Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who sits on the House Select Committee tasked with investigating the events of January 6, did not mince words about the attack against the United States Capitol or about former President Donald Trump’s role in it.
“This was a coup organized by the president against the vice-president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in an interview with the Guardian, Reuters news agency and the Climate One radio program.
“We’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan,” he added.
“We don’t have a lot of experience with coups in our own country and we think of a coup as something that takes place against a president,” Raskin observed, noting that the attack is typically not characterized as a coup because it did not involve the military or another societal faction attacking the seat of government. “It’s what the political scientists call a self-coup … It’s a president fearful of defeat, overthrowing the constitutional process.”
Raskin said that the United States can meet its climate goals as soon as it contends with extremist conservative groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers who have used their influence to sow disinformation about the attack as well as Democratic legislative priorities.
“We’re never going to be able to successfully deal with climate change if we’re spending all our time fighting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and Ku Klux Klan, and the Aryan nations and all of Steve Bannon’s alt-right nonsense,” Raskin said.
Before his role on the committee, Raskin was named the lead impeachment manager for the Senate trial during the second impeachment of then-President Trump. He was one of the primary authors of the impeachment article which charged Trump with inciting an insurrection against Congress.
Alan is a writer, editor, and news junkie based in New York.