The bulk of the report is made of eight chapters intended to tell a narrative story of Mr. Trump’s efforts to hang on to power.
“The Big Lie,” the first chapter, recounts how Mr. Trump engaged in a premeditated plan starting on election night to falsely claim that he had won and claim that outstanding votes were fraudulent — and that he went on making those claims for months even after being informed repeatedly by his aides that he was wrong and had lost. Attorney General William P. Barr told the committee that Mr. Trump never showed any “indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”
“Donald Trump was no passive consumer of these lies,” the report said. “He actively propagated them. Time and again President Trump was informed that his election fraud claims were not true. He chose to spread them anyway. He did so even after they were legally tested and rejected in dozens of lawsuits.”
Chapter 2, titled “I Just Want to Find 11,780 Votes,” recounts how Mr. Trump sought to pressure officials in Georgia to find the votes he needed to swing the state, which had been won by Mr. Biden, into his column. It goes on to explore Mr. Trump’s largely unsuccessful pressure campaign on a wide array of officials in other swing states he had lost to find ways to reverse the outcome.
At one point, the report says, the White House switchboard left a message for the chairman of the Maricopa County board of supervisors to call Mr. Trump, who was pushing for investigations into voting machines there. (The chairman decided not to return the phone call from the president of the United States.)
Subsequent chapters cover the genesis of the so-called fake electors scheme, in which Mr. Trump and his allies sought to promote alternative slates of electors from states he had lost to try to block or delay certification of Mr. Biden’s victory, and Mr. Trump’s campaign to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into using his role overseeing the congressional certification process as president of the Senate to bring the fake elector plan to fruition.
Mr. Trump was largely reliant on Mr. Eastman to provide legal justification for Mr. Pence in effect unilaterally deciding whether to accept the outcome of the election, but the report shows that he turned to other aides to help make the case as well. It says that either Mr. Trump or Mr. Meadows “tasked John McEntee, the director of the Presidential Personnel Office, with researching the matter further. Though McEntee was one of President Trump’s close advisers, he was not a lawyer and had no relevant experience.”
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