The Committee News is a weekly publication highlighting news about the Town of Arlington Equal Opportunity Advisory Committee (EOAC). The EOAC seeks qualified individuals with a background in human resources or construction management that are civic minded and value fairness and level playing fields. The EOAC oversees compliance with the Town’s equal opportunity and minority participation goals on municipal and contracted projects. The EOAC holds monthly meetings on the second Wednesday of the month.
The 845-page report — based on a year and a half of investigation, 1,000-plus interviews, text messages, phone records, emails, and more than a million pages of documents — alleges that Trump directed and coordinated the legally dubious plan to put forward fake slates of electors in states he lost. The report says the effort was “a clear attempt to undermine democracy.” The committee’s executive summary first released Monday said lawmakers have evidence that could lead to criminal charges against Trump, including obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiring to make false statements, assisting or aiding insurrection and seditious conspiracy.
It also includes details of how Trump campaign and Republican National Committee fundraising pitches containing false claims of election fraud raised more than $250 million from supporters. It also includes quotes from Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who told the committee that he was unaware of any definitive proof that voting machines had been tampered with, despite making such claims in public. The report cites 68 contacts between Trump and state or local officials, involving either in-person meetings, telephone calls or text messages aimed at those officials, or social media posts by Trump or his aides targeting those officials.
In the days leading up to January 6, the report says, Trump latched onto one of Eastman’s theories and made a series of phone calls requesting that Pence intervene when Congress certified the Electoral College results. The report says the phone calls and a meeting between Trump and Pence in the Oval Office included “a litany of false election-fraud claims” that Pence tried to convince the president to drop.
Ultimately, the panel concluded that there is sufficient evidence to refer both Trump and his lawyer, John Eastman, under statutes that outlaw obstruction and conspiracy to defraud the United States. It also recommends that Congress pass legislation aimed at overhauling the 1887 law requiring an Electoral College vote be ratified by Congress to make it harder to overturn a presidential election.
The committee’s executive summary also makes recommendations for how the House can better encourage civility and bipartisanship. It recommends that committees hold bipartisan retreats, require members to sit with people from the opposite party during committee sessions and have them rotate on a regular basis, expand the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, improve technology, and allow for machine-readable legislative documents. Some of those recommendations have already been adopted into a package the committee is now working to move through the House.