Presidential documents recovered at Trump residence in Florida 1:45
(CNN) --
A staggering daily stream of revelations is shedding new light on the depraved effort by Donald Trump, his aides and extremist Republicans to cover up the former president's constitutional arson and his desperate attempt to steal power after the 2020 election.
It is extraordinary that more than 13 months after the insurrection in the US Capitol, the depth of lawlessness and Trump's abuses of power are still coming to light.
It will be up to the House committee investigating the attack to paint the full picture and weigh whether they believe there was a criminal conspiracy and the extent to which Trump knew of and directed it.
But new evidence and reports already strongly suggest that the Trump team presided over multiple schemes to discredit the election;
tried to steal President Joe Biden's victory in the states with rogue lawyers;
encouraged false voters;
and tried to block his certification in Congress.
ANALYSIS |
Trump sparks another GOP civil war, jeopardizing the party's midterm strategy
Wednesday's revelations alone underscored the vast scope of the commission's investigation, the worrying breadth of the subversion effort and what looks increasingly like a Trump world cover-up.
The National Archives asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump's handling of presidential records, all of which should have been turned over when his administration ended.
The request came after multiple reports that Trump tore up documents and Archives staff had to re-tape some that were turned over to the House committee.
In another astonishing development, The Washington Post reported that Trump's former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, asked a Michigan Republican prosecutor to turn over the county's voting machines, citing a bogus cheating conspiracy theory.
The commission now cited another key former White House official, Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro, who played a major role in raising false conspiracy theories about a stolen election.
And late Wednesday, The New York Times reported that some of the documents improperly brought to Trump's Mar-a-Lago complex are believed to be classified.
While a president can declassify any material at any time, history suggests that Trump is guilty of gross hypocrisy given her criticism of Hillary Clinton over classified material on her email server that may have cost him the 2016 election. .
Pence responds to Trump on his right to nullify the 2020 election 1:50
New details challenge Trump's cover-up effort
Wednesday's torrent of revelations only hints at the size of the Trump White House election-stealing effort and the House committee's investigation into the events that culminated in one of the darkest days of the political history of the United States.
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If there is any consolation for those who believe in American democracy, it is that all the plans failed, often due to the courage of local and state officials, many of them Republicans.
But this Wednesday it became even clearer that a former president and a body of co-religionists were willing to try to defy the will of the voters with authoritarian measures.
That reality underscores the grave danger facing future elections in the United States.
Trump is seeking to insert like-minded activists and candidates into key election oversight positions, in what appears to be an attempt to destroy the safeguards that prevented him from stealing the last election.
It is also alarming that while enemies of the United States like Russia and China are intensifying their efforts to discredit democracy in the United States and around the world, their goals are shared by Americans working to destroy it from within.
ANALYSIS |
The Republican Party is enabling Trump's policy of violence
The latest details about the insurrection have emerged despite relentless efforts by Trump and those around him to obstruct the January 6 investigation.
The president launched an unsuccessful campaign to the Supreme Court to prevent the West Wing documents from reaching the House committee.
Some of his aides have made spurious claims of executive privilege to frustrate the panel, which said Wednesday that he had nonetheless conducted 500 interviews.
House Republicans have tried to prevent the investigation from launching and are sure to shut it down if they win a majority in the November midterm elections.
The advances of the commission provoke extreme reactions
The closer the commission seems to be to uncovering the truth, the more insane the reaction from the Trump camp.
Over the weekend, in a resolution censuring two Republicans who were part of the January 6 panel, the Republican National Committee (RNC) called the insurrection "legitimate political speech."
That was followed this Wednesday by Navarro releasing an outburst without rhyme or reason after being subpoenaed by the panel to explain the alleged efforts to delay the certification of the results of the 2020 elections. He accused the commission, which is investigating an insurrection without precedent aimed at nullifying an election in the United States, of being "domestic terrorists."
The National Archives' request for the Justice Department to investigate Trump's handling of White House records intensifies controversy over one of the latest investigative streams the commission is pursuing.
A source told CNN that the Archives want a review of whether Trump violated the Presidential Records Act, which requires all paper and other documents to be turned over to the National Archives at the end of an administration, and other possible violations, including the handling of classified information.
CNN has reported that the former president routinely tore up documents and took some with him to Mar-a-Lago after leaving office.
The National Archives recovered 15 boxes from the Florida resort last month.
And a person familiar with the matter previously told CNN that the Archives' general counsel, Gary Stern, had contacted the Trump team last fall to inquire about the records apparently kept there.
Commission investigating January 6 quotes Giuliani 2:13
It was unclear Wednesday whether the Justice Department would launch an investigation.
Even if he did, it seems unlikely the former president would face any formal consequences, as the Presidential Records Act contains no enforcement mechanism.
The Archives request, first reported by The Washington Post, comes after days of reports about Trump's habit of tearing up documents.
Sources have said archivists have been forced to try to glue the torn papers together before handing them over to the House select committee.
The question now is whether Trump will face another legal front, in addition to a criminal investigation in Georgia into his attempt to steal votes and investigations in New York into the accounting of his company.
Throughout his personal and business lives, Trump has shown an incredible ability to evade the consequences of his actions, often because his transgressions are so broad and unprecedented that they defy any previous expectation of the behavior of presidents.
On the issue of torn and missing documents, Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, suggested that Trump may once again escape legal peril.
"It's clearly illegal," he said on CNN's "Newsroom" on Wednesday.
"The question of whether it is a crime is a bit more complicated. If the intention was, for example, to obstruct justice, conceal wrongdoing or other illegal activity, that would be a crime. Otherwise, it is very wrong, but there is no no enforcement mechanism or obvious criminal sanction".
The presidency as a personal right
The fact that the president appears to have openly flouted record-keeping laws was the latest example of his disregard for the traditions and laws that have long defined the office he held for four wild and damaging years.
Records of all presidents are preserved, providing historians with intimately detailed primary sources that can be used to reconstruct presidencies decades later.
But Trump always seemed to view the presidency as a personal entitlement with which he could do as he pleased, rather than a sacred trust meant to promote and defend the national interest.
The fact that he appears to be trying to win back the presidency in 2024 -- even with all this new evidence of his misconduct -- only underscores that the next few years could be even more dangerous for America's democratic governance and respect for America. presidential limits than the previous five.
Evan Perez, Ryan Nobles, Zachary Cohen, Annie Grayer, and Marshall Cohen contributed to this article.
Assault on Capitol Donald Trump