Trump win made official as Harris presides over election certification four years after Jan 6 riot
Share:
The joint session to certify the 2024 election went off without interruptions as Vice President Kamala Harris made her defeat at the hands of Donald Trump official. Exactly four years after a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters perpetrated the worst attack on the US Capitol since Major General Robert Ross ordered British soldiers to set it ablaze more than two centuries before, Vice President Kamala Harris presided over a joint session of Congress to give Trump the peaceful transfer of power she was denied after the 2020 election.
![[U.S. Capitol Police officers stand watch outside the U.S. Capitol building as snow falls ahead of a joint session of Congress. Travel in the area has been snarled by Winter Storm Blair]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/01/06/17/GettyImages-2192144057.jpg)
Harris, who four years earlier was both vice president-elect and the sitting junior senator from California, led senators from their chamber across the Capitol’s ornate rotunda into the House chamber at exactly 1:00 p.m. on Monday, the date laid out in American law for Congress to officially certify the election of the next president and vice president.
She smiled as she entered the chamber to polite applause from both sides of the aisle. She walked past a beaming Marjorie Taylor Greene, an outspoken supporter of the rioters who stormed the same room four years ago. JD Vance, vice president-elect, entered shortly after and took his seat on the front row. Harris stood alongside Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson as both watched as the Electoral College votes counted.
Unlike four years ago, when then-vice president Mike Pence read out the results and asked if senators or representatives had any objections to each state’s electoral vote totals, this year’s joint session employed a new procedure devised by lawmakers in the wake of Trump’s effort to overturn the election results four years ago.
