This was just one of the bombshells from the Commission’s second hearing on Monday, January 6, as committee members tried to answer a famous question from another case of presidential indecency: What did the president know and when did he know? The members of the Commission came out abruptly on Monday, trying to answer this question definitively. Speaker Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), who is leading the hearing, began her opening remarks by saying that Trump “knowingly” relied on false allegations that there was widespread electoral fraud to deceive his supporters into believing that 2020 elections had been stolen – something he knew was wrong. “Mr. Trump’s closest advisers knew that. Mr. Trump knew that,” Lofgren said. The commission also revealed that Trump’s “official election defense fund” – which raised $ 250 million for a Political Action Committee set up after his loss – did not really exist. Instead, it was a marketing ploy to divert money to other entities that enriched those closest to him. A slide show by congressional investigators found that $ 5 million went to Event Strategies, which helped organize a rally at The Ellipse near the White House, where Trump shot an angry mob that later attacked the Capitol building. They also noted that $ 1 million went to Mark Meadows’s nonprofit Conservative Partnership Institute, another $ 1 million went to America First Policy Institute to support candidates loyal to Trump across the country, and $ 204,857 went to the Trump Hotel collection. . “The Big Lie was also a big break,” Lofgren said. Co-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) said the committee would look into the matter at a future hearing. As for this hearing, it officially started with a 47 minute delay, after Trump’s campaign director, Bill Stepien, withdrew from his testimony because his wife started giving birth. When the hearing finally began, President Bennie Thompson (D-MS) said that today was about telling “the story of how Donald Trump lost the election and knew he lost the election.” “As a result of his loss,” Thompson continued, “Trump decided to attack our democracy, trying to steal you and your voice in our democracy, and thus lit the wick that led to the horrific violence in January.” 6th. ” Cheney followed suit, saying Trump ignored the facts and instead “followed the advice of a seemingly drunk Rudy Giuliani,” who simply told him to reject the results and fight them anyway. The committee played video recordings of some of Trump’s closest aides – Stephen and senior adviser Jason Miller – talking about the unwanted role played by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. In the video, Trump’s advisers said that Giuliani looked drunk on election night and repeatedly insisted on talking to Trump, just as Fox News called Arizona about Joe Biden and the mood was down in the White House. “It was too early for me to make such a phone call. Ballot boxes were still being counted. “The polls still had to be counted for days,” Stepien testified in February. “My recommendation was to say that the votes were still being counted, it was too early to announce the race.” In a videotaped statement, Miller told the committee that “we should not go on declaring victory until we have a better understanding of the numbers.” But Giuliani became provocative and told them: “We won, they steal it from us … we have to say we won”. Miller said Giuliani’s aggressive tone was that “anyone who disagreed with this position was weak.” The former attorney general also repeatedly said he told Trump that allegations of widespread voter fraud were false. “I thought, boy, if he really believes these things, he’s lost touch with him – he’s detached from reality if he really believes them,” Barr said. Barr recalled holding a luncheon with Associated Press reporter Mike Balsamo, in which the attorney general told him – without certainty – that the Justice Department had not seen levels of fraud approaching affect the outcome of the 2020 election. Barr told the committee he was expecting to be fired from the White House later that afternoon. Instead, he met with Trump at the Oval Office, where the president became outraged and launched conspiracy theories. Barr said Trump was “as crazy as I have ever seen” when he told the president he did not believe there was anything substantial in the allegations of voter fraud. Barr said he was shocked by the “stupid allegations” and “worrying allegations” about the voting machines and the alleged secret deliveries of fake ballots that would affect Biden’s election. “I told them it was crazy and they were wasting their time on it. “He did a serious disservice to the country,” Bar told the commission. Instead of rejecting it, Trump allowed White House adviser Peter Navarro to develop a formal report, full of conspiracy theories, that would summarize weak and fabricated evidence to challenge the election. The committee played a video of a testimony by Alex Cannon – a Trump Organization lawyer who later joined the candidate’s campaign – in which he recalled his interactions with Navarro shortly after the mid-November election. When Cannon ousted Navarro’s position on mass fraud – and pointed out how the Homeland Security’s Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Service had publicly assured that the 2020 election was indeed safe – he came under personal attack. “I remember telling him I did not believe Dominion’s claims, because repeating the counting by hand in Georgia would solve any technological problems,” Canon said. He recalled that Navarro accused him of being an “agent of the deep state” working against the president. Canon vowed never to receive another call from Navarro. Former Fox News columnist Chris Stirewalt also testified before the committee Monday that Biden undoubtedly won 2020 – and stood by his network’s decision to quickly report Trump’s astonishing losses in the otherwise red states of Arizona and of Georgia. As time went on, he said, Trump’s loss became more apparent. “We already knew that Trump’s chances were slim and small,” he said. His testimony was remarkable, as the television network for weeks after the election continued to feed conspiracy theories about lost and damaged ballots with news that was so far removed from reality that the company eventually sued an electoral machine manufacturer. Although Stepien did not appear in person, his videotaped testimony was devastating. He has repeatedly said he did not believe there was evidence that Trump won the election, and Stephen said Juliani and Trump’s insistence on a winning strategy eventually led him to “withdraw” from the campaign. During the second half of the hearing, Lofgren spoke to those in the front line who faced Trump’s lies. BJay Pak, who served as the top federal prosecutor in northern Georgia, testified Monday that the FBI was investigating a video that allegedly showed a Fulton County employee hiding ballot papers under a briefcase for a briefcase. to find out that the clerk actually did their job and secured the ballots in an authorized locked box. Al Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city commissioner, later said the city took “seriously” any allegations of electoral fraud and investigated Trump camp allegations that fake ballots were submitted on behalf of the dead. “Not only were there no figures for the 8,000 dead voters who voted in Pennsylvania, there were not even figures for eight,” Schmidt said. When Trump tweeted directly to the city commissioner at the time, Schmidt said, he and his family were flooded with detailed death threats. “The threats became much more specific, much more graphic and did not just include me by name, but included my family members, their names, age, address, photos of our house, every detail you could imagine,” he said. . .
