Road to a Second Impeachment
In the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol, the House Democrats on Jan. 11 introduced legislation to impeach President Donald Trump, charging him with “inciting violence against the Government of the United States.”
The impeachment resolution accuses the president of repeatedly issuing “false statements asserting that the Presidential election results were the product of widespread fraud and should not be accepted by the American people or certified by State or Federal officials.” The House voted 232-197 to impeach the president on Jan. 13, with the support of 10 Republicans.
Trump’s relentless attack on the election results culminated with a speech to his supporters at a “Save America” rally on Jan. 6 — shortly before Congress and Vice President Mike Pence gathered in the Capitol to formally count the electoral votes.
House impeachment resolution, Jan. 11: There, he reiterated false claims that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide.” He also willfully made statements that, in context, encouraged — and foreseeably resulted in — lawless action at the Capitol, such as: “if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Thus incited by President Trump, members of the crowd he had addressed, in an attempt to, among other objectives, interfere with the Joint Session’s solemn constitutional duty to certify the results of the 2020 Presidential election, unlawfully breached and vandalized the Capitol, injured and killed law enforcement personnel, menaced Members of Congress, the Vice President, and Congressional personnel, and engaged in other violent, deadly, destructive, and seditious acts.
The electoral vote count — which was interrupted by the deadly riot at the Capitol and delayed by Republican opposition to Biden electors in Arizona and Pennsylvania — ended at about 3:40 a.m. on Jan. 7 with Pence announcing that Joe Biden would become the 46th president.
Here we review Trump’s comments and actions leading up to the impeachment vote, beginning with his baseless claims about the potential for election fraud long before the Nov. 3 election.
Despite the president’s warnings of fraud and his cries of a stolen election, the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees described the 2020 election as “the most secure in American history.”
“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” the groups of federal, state and local officials said in a Nov. 12 joint statement.
Even Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, rebutted his claims, telling the Associated Press on Dec. 1 that the Department of Justice and FBI “have not seen fraud on a scale that could have affected a different outcome in the election.”
Before the Election
For years, Trump has made false and misleading claims of rampant voter fraud in U.S. elections: Even after winning the 2016 Electoral College vote, Trump made the bogus claim that he also won the popular vote “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Throughout 2020, he primed his supporters to believe that if he lost his reelection bid, it could only mean the election was stolen from him.
The president also declined to criticize fringe groups that support him. When asked to do so, Trump didn’t disavow the conspiracy theory QAnon, which promotes the baseless idea that Trump is working to dismantle an elite child sex trafficking ring involving top Democrats. He repeatedly shared Twitter posts from accounts that push the conspiracy. He made ambiguous remarks when asked to denouce the Proud Boys, a far-right group, and he declined to urge his supporters to remain calm while votes were counted.
We include a sampling of Trump’s preelection claims here:
