Key Points
- The pressuring of state officials has become the focus of the investigation.
- Mr Trump has denied wrongdoing while repeating claims he lost only because of widespread fraud.
US state election officials have recounted how Donald Trump supporters threatened them and their families after they refused to help the former president overturn his 2020 election defeat.
The congressional committee investigating the deadly 6 January 2021 riots at the US Capitol by Trump supporters shifted its focus on Tuesday to the Republican's pressuring of state officials as he sought to remain in the White House.
It was the fourth of at least six public hearings the nine-member Select Committee is holding this month on its nearly year-long investigation of the attack on the Capitol by thousands of Trump supporters as vice president Mike Pence met with members of Congress to formally certify Mr Trump's defeat by Democrat Joe Biden.
"We received ... in excess of 20,000 emails and tens of thousands of voice mails and texts, which saturated our offices and we were unable to work, at least communicate," Rusty Bowers, speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, told the committee.
He said the harassment has continued, with demonstrations at his house, confrontations with neighbours and other threats and insults that continued even when his daughter was gravely ill.
"It was disturbing, it was disturbing," Mr Bowers — who had campaigned for Mr Trump in 2020 and said he had wanted him to be re-elected — testified, his voice breaking.
Mr Bowers described conversations with Mr Trump and his close aides including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and adviser John Eastman, who urged Mr Bowers to reject the election results.
"You're asking me to do something against my oath and I will not break my oath," Mr Bowers said, recounting a conversation with Mr Giuliani.
At a raucous rally on 6 January, then-president Trump urged supporters to march on the Capitol.
He had seized on that date — when Mr Pence was to certify the election — as a last-ditch chance to hold onto the White House despite his loss at the polls.
"What happened to Mike Pence wasn't an isolated part of Donald Trump's scheme to overturn the election. In fact, pressuring public servants into betraying their oath was a fundamental part of the playbook," Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, chairperson of the committee, said.
Mr Thompson was referring to a hearing last week that focused on pressure Mr Trump and his associates put on Mr Pence to oppose formal certification of the November 2020 presidential election result.
The committee also played audio and video recordings in which close Trump associates — and the president himself — urged state officials to reject the election results.
Mr Trump has denied wrongdoing while repeating claims he lost only because of widespread fraud that benefited Biden.
US state and federal officials have rejected claims of widespread irregularities in the 2020 vote.
Mr Trump and his supporters — including many Republican members of Congress — dismiss the 6 January panel as a political witch hunt but the panel's backers say it is a necessary probe into a violent threat against democracy.
