January 6 United States Capitol attack has goal attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election
Background
Attempts to overturn the presidential election
Democrat Joe Biden defeated incumbent Republican Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election. Trump and other Republicans attempted to overturn the election, falsely claiming widespread voter fraud.
Within hours after the closing of the polls, while votes were still being tabulated, Trump declared victory, demanding that further counting be halted. He began a campaign to subvert the election, through legal challenges and an extralegal effort. Trump's lawyers had concluded within ten days after the election that legal challenges to the election results had no factual basis or legal merit. Despite those analyses, he sought to overturn the results by filing at least sixty lawsuits, including two brought to the Supreme Court. Those actions sought to nullify election certifications and to void votes that had been cast for Biden. Those challenges were all rejected by the courts for lack of evidence or the absence of legal standing.Trump then mounted a campaign to pressure Republican governors, secretaries of state, and state legislatures to nullify results by replacing slates of Biden electors with those declared to Trump, or by manufacturing evidence of fraud. He further demanded that lawmakers investigate ostensible election "irregularities" such as by conducting signature matches of mailed-in ballots, disregarding any prior analytic efforts. Trump also personally made inquiries proposing the invocation of martial law to "re-run" or reverse the election and the appointment of a special counsel to find instances of fraud, despite conclusions by federal and state officials that such cases were few and isolated or non-existent. Trump ultimately undertook neither step. Trump repeatedly urged Vice President Mike Pence to alter the results and to stop Biden from taking office. None of those actions would have been within Pence's constitutional powers as vice president and president of the Senate. Trump repeated this call in his rally speech on the morning of January 6.Numerous scholars, historians, political scientists, and journalists have characterized these efforts to overturn the election as an attempted self-coup by Trump and an implementation of the big lie. On July 16, 2023, Donald Trump was notified that he was officially a target in the Smith special counsel investigation.