The audition will be broadcast as a CBS Special News Report presented by CBS Evening News presenter and editor-in-chief Norah O’Donnell. She will be joined by CBS News chief political analyst John Dickerson, Washington-based correspondent Major Garrett, White House Chief of Staff Nancy Cordes, Election and Campaign Correspondent Robert Costa and Correspondent Scott K Korela .
Commission aides said Monday’s hearing would focus on the “Big Lie”, recording how former President Donald Trump declared victory on election night, even though he was told he did not have the numbers to win and how he continued to embrace unfounded allegations of electoral fraud.
“We will hear testimonies from government officials who were looking for the fraud and how the attempt to uncover these baseless allegations did not bear fruit,” said an aide to the commission. “The fraud they were looking for simply did not exist and the former president was told that, over and over again, the allegations were unfounded, but he kept repeating them anyway.”
Monday’s hearing will have two groups of witnesses. The first panel will consist of former Trump campaign director William Stepien and former Fox News political director Chris Stirwalt, who left Fox News shortly after the 2020 presidential election, in which the group correctly called Arizona for Joe Biden before other networks. The second committee will consist of electoral lawyer Benjamin Ginsberg, a former U.S. attorney for Georgia BJ Pak who resigned Jan. 4, 2021, and former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt.
Some of the witnesses are expected to testify about the main electoral dispute settlement and how such an action usually proceeds. An aide to the commission said the commission would also prove that Trump campaign aides used the allegations of electoral fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars between the election and the Jan. 6 election. Finally, the aide said, the commission will show that “some of those responsible for the violence at 6 o’clock repeated exactly the same lies that the former president told in the wake of the uprising.”
Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi and chairman of the House Selection Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol, speaks during a hearing in Washington, DC, on June 9, 2022. Ting Shen / Bloomberg via Getty pictures
Committee Vice-Chairwoman Liz Cheney said last week that a second hearing would show that “Donald Trump and his advisers knew he had actually lost the election.”
“But despite this, President Trump has made a tremendous effort to spread false and misleading information – to convince huge sections of the US population that the fraud had stolen the election from him. That was not true,” Cheney said. at Thursday’s hearing.
Cheney and committee chairman Benny Thompson chaired the first public hearing, which took place on Thursday. At that hearing, the commission sought to link Trump’s baseless allegations of rigged elections to the January 6 riots and violence that Thompson described as “the culmination of a coup attempt.”
Testimonies were presented by some of the top figures in Trump’s trajectory who said they had told him he had not won the election. Thompson played a recording of former Attorney General William Barr’s testimony before the commission, in which he said he told the former president that his allegations of stolen elections were “nonsense **”. In another video, Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, said she “trusts” Barr and acknowledged his insistence that her father had lost the election.
Cheney also said there were members of Congress who apologized to Trump for their role in the attack. Cheney named Pennsylvania lawmaker Scott Perry as one of those Republicans, a claim he denied Friday.
MP Adam Kinzinger, Cheney’s Republican counterpart in the committee, told Face the Nation on Sunday that “we are not going to blame or say things without evidence or evidence to support it.”
Kinzinger says commission on Jan. 6 will present evidence that lawmakers have apologized to Trump 08:20
Cheney said harsh words Thursday about Republicans who agreed with Trump after the attack: “There will come a day when Donald Trump will leave, but your dishonesty will remain.”
In addition to the recorded testimony and some unseen videos from the first hearing on January 6, two witnesses also testified: documentary director Nick Quested, who was part of the Proud Boys during the uprising, and the Capitol. Edwards, who suffered a traumatic brain injury on Jan. 6. Edwards described seeing a “war scene” on January 6.
“It was like I saw it outside the movies,” Edwards said. “I could not believe my eyes. There were policemen on the ground. They were bleeding. They were vomiting. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I caught people as they fell. It was a massacre. It was chaos.”
A Capitol police officer describes “massacre” and “chaos” during January 6th. attack 13:07
The hearing also touched on the role of the Proud Boys in the January 6 attack. In a testimony video released Thursday, some members of the group said they believed Trump’s observation in a presidential debate “to stand back and stand side by side” was a call to action. Quested testified that the Proud Boys were organized and headed for the Capitol at 10 a.m., before Trump’s speech at the Ellipse even began.
Thompson and Cheney tried to show that, amid the chaos at the Capitol, Trump was not fulfilling his duties as president. They showed video testimony from General Mark Milley, the current chairman of the General Staff, saying that former Vice President Pence – not Trump – gave the orders for the National Guard to come to the building.
While Pence is unlikely to attend the hearings, some of his top advisers are attending. Greg Jacob, Pence’s former general counsel, Mark Short, his former chief of staff, and conservative lawyer J. Michael Lutig, who advised Pence before Jan. 6, is likely to testify in the coming weeks.
