Rep. Jamie Raskin, an influential Democrat from Maryland, didn’t mince words about former President Donald Trump when asked to describe what the House’s January 6th committee has learned during its months long investigation.

New: Jan. 6 committee member Jamie Raskin tells @GuardianUS if the Capitol attack succeeded in stopping Biden’s certification, “Trump was prepared to seize the presidency and likely to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law”

— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) April 20, 2022

“This was a coup organized by the president against the vice president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in an interview with Reuters, The Guardian, and Climate One.

“We don’t have a lot of experience with coups in our own country and we think of a coup as something that takes place against a president,” he said, before explaining that the events culminating in the Capitol attack are “what the political scientists call a self-coup … it’s a president fearful of defeat, overthrowing the constitutional process.”

The Guardian reports:

If the attack on the Capitol had succeeded in preventing the certification of Biden as the incoming president, Raskin asserted that “Trump was prepared to seize the presidency and likely to invoke the Insurrection Act and declare martial law.”

The insurrection resulted in death and injury to law enforcement and Raskin said that in addition to Pence’s stance against Trump’s demands, the democratic process that day was also saved by “the valor and the bravery of our officers who stood strong against the attempt to just overrun the whole process.”

Raskin, who is a member of the committee, alluded to its forthcoming public hearings, saying “We’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by (then-Vice President) Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan.”

Then-President Donald Trump attempted a coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and that will be a centerpiece of committee hearings in Congress next month, said Democrat Jamie Raskin, a committee member who led the prosecution of Trump's second impeachment. https://t.co/Vp9QodAvPi

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) April 18, 2022

Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Missouri Democrat who chairs the 1/6 investigation, recently said the public hearings will resume in May.

“Raskin said the hearings will lay out for the public the steps the former president and his associates took to try to stay in power despite a clear-cut defeat,” according to Reuters. The outlet notes that Raskin said “the committee had yet to decide whether to try to seek testimony from Trump or Pence.”

Raskin spoke to the media outlets as part of their Covering Climate Now collaboration.

“We’re never going to be able to successfully deal with climate change if we’re spending all our time fighting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and Ku Klux Klan, and the Aryan nations and all of Steve Bannon’s alt-right nonsense,” he said.