The House select committee's inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack on the United States is already in its first full week of hearings. According to a recent ABC News/Ipsos survey, nearly 6 in 10 Americans say former President Donald Trump should be charged with a crime for his participation in the event.
According to the survey, six out of ten Americans believe the committee is conducting a fair and unbiased inquiry. Meanwhile, 58% of Americans believe Trump should be prosecuted for a crime for his participation in the violence, which Ipsos conducted in cooperation with ABC News using Ipsos' KnowledgePanel.
Witnesses Testify Against Donald Trump
In late April, before the hearings began, an ABC News/Washington Post survey revealed that 52% of Americans believed the former president should be indicted. In a survey conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post days after the attack in January 2021, 54 percent of Americans said Trump should be prosecuted for instigating a riot.
The poll shows a partisan difference, with 91% of Democrats believing Trump should face criminal charges, compared to 19% of Republicans. Also, 91% of Democrats and 21% of Republicans agree that Trump holds "a considerable deal" or "a good amount" of responsibility for the attack. Furthermore, 62% of self-described independents believe Trump should be prosecuted, and 61% believe he has a "great deal" or "fair amount" of blame.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., one of two Republicans on the House Select Committee probing the Jan. 6 incident, said that Trump is "guilty of knowing what he did" in the lead-up to the attack, USA Today reported.
Multiple witnesses testified before the panel on Thursday, detailing Trump's efforts to persuade his vice president to reject electoral votes for Joe Biden during the formal certification of state results. A nationally representative probability sample of 545 people was polled on June 17-18. It has a 4.5 percentage point sampling error margin.
Trump Denies Calling Pence a "Wimp"
Meanwhile, Trump denied calling then-Vice President Mike Pence a "wimp" for refusing to reject Electoral College votes on Friday, claiming instead that he told Pence that "you're no Thomas Jefferson."
Former Trump staffer Nick Luna told the House select committee investigating the riot that Trump labeled Pence "a wimp" on the day of last year's Capitol incident. Pence did not comment on a different complaint made by Julie Radford, a former staffer to first daughter Ivanka Trump, who said Trump used the "p-word" to refer to him.
Trump claimed he tried to persuade Pence to return electors to swing state legislatures by comparing it to the conduct of founding father and then-vice president Thomas Jefferson in the 1800 election.
"I'm not sure - maybe the state legislatures wouldn't have moved if Pence tried to reject electors," said the former president, who lost by razor-thin margins in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. However, I believe they would have."
Per NY Post, Trump also criticized the House select committee, calling it a "one-sided witch hunt" after a primetime meeting last Thursday and two daytime hearings this week. The committee is incorrect in using the term "insurgency" to characterize the violence in which a crowd of Trump supporters fought police officers for hours and stormed into the Capitol to prevent President-elect Biden's win from being certified.
