Harvard researchers delve into court documents to probe motivations of Jan. 6 rioters
“A significant number of the defendants specifically mentioned or implied that they had come to the Capitol on January 6 at the express invitation of Donald Trump."
Jan. 6:
Researchers at Harvard delved into court documents in the cases of hundreds of people charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the US Capitol in Washington, trying to figure out why they did it. The most common motivations, researchers found, were support for Donald Trump and the mistaken belief that the election was rigged.
“Far and away, we find that the two most commonly-cited reasons for breaching the US Capitol were a desire to support Trump on January 6th in DC and concerns about election integrity,” the researchers from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School wrote in a working paper issued last week .
“A significant number of the defendants specifically mentioned or implied that they had come to the Capitol on January 6 at the express invitation of Donald Trump, who they believed had requested their assistance in ‘defending democracy’ from election fraud,” researchers said.
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