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As things stand, more than 1,000 people have been charged for taking part in the Jan. 6 violence at the U.S. Capitol. As HuffPost noted, many of them have said in no uncertain terms that they were acting in response to Donald Trump’s directions.
Nearly 200 of the people arrested and charged for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have said they were responding to calls by Donald Trump to help keep him in the White House, according to a new analysis by a government watchdog group. “CREW’s analysis bolsters the evidence that January 6th was the result of organized efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to halt the certification of a free and fair election by force,” the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington wrote in a report released Thursday.
The organization’s detailed report specifically pointed to 174 Jan. 6 defendants who said they went to the Capitol because they believed the then-president asked them to. From the CREW document released yesterday:
Nicholas Languerand, who assaulted officers with a traffic barrier, pepper spray can, and other objects, posted a “#MessageFor45” on Twitter four days after Trump’s “will be wild” tweet, saying “We’re picking up your messages, and we’re listening. We’re ready to do this thing.” ... Douglas Austin Jensen, who chased Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman up a flight of stairs inside the Capitol, told investigators, “Trump posted make sure you’re there, January 6 for the rally in Washington, D.C. ... and then he got us all fired up to go to [the Capitol].”
To be sure, none of this is especially surprising. Indeed, the bipartisan House select committee that investigated the insurrectionist violence placed the blame directly on the former president, and congressional investigators bolstered their findings with voluminous evidence.
But as special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal investigation advances, and prosecutors consider the possibility of charging Trump again, the Republican’s defense has been that he wasn’t responsible for deploying a radicalized mob to Capitol Hill. Several dozen of his followers are on record explicitly saying the opposite.