The committee surprised many observers on Sunday when it announced that Trump’s campaign director, Bill Stepien, would testify in person at Monday’s hearing. But Stepien had a surprise of his own on Monday morning when he found out that his wife had started giving birth, so he withdrew from the hearing. This whirlwind of events forced the panel to confront – and they handled it skillfully, albeit after a 45-minute delay. Lawmakers and committee staff were apparently prepared with videos of Stepien’s private testimony. And they played many shots from his testimony on Monday, which revealed new details about his talks with Trump and how he advised the President not to declare victory prematurely on election night. In a way, the result gave the Democrat-led committee more power to control what the public heard from Stepien. He was not in the room to say his part, which could have included some of Trump’s defenses and some repulsion against the committee. Instead, the panel was able to pick and choose which deposition clips to play and focused like a laser on the most damaging material for Trump.

Long-term testimonies take place as witnesses testify

Stepien’s testimony was not the only use by the commission on Monday. The committee presented extensive portions of former Attorney General William Barr’s testimony to the committee, detailing why Trump’s allegations of fraud were “false” and why he has not seen anything since to convince him that there was fraud. “There has never been a show of interest in the facts,” Barr said in a video of his deposition on Monday. “I was a little heartbroken because 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.’ “ The committee did not invite Barr to testify in public for Monday’s hearing, but the minutes of his deposition played on him sometimes made him feel as if he were there. The video footage also gave the commission the opportunity to testify from others in Trump’s inner circle – including Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kouchner – without having to bring them to testify. And by simply showing video footage, the panel checks which audio bites are transmitted. The hearing shows that Barr played a key role in setting the tone for “Team Normal,” the group of campaign officials and White House officials trying to convince Trump that the allegations of fraud were false. It is not for lack of effort to find fraud. Barr had issued a controversial note weeks earlier that allowed prosecutors to look into electoral crime allegations even before the vote was certified. Bar’s move prompted a senior public integrity official in the Justice Department to resign. Bar searched for fraud and did not find it.

Bar becomes general

Democrats insulted Barr when he was in power – accusing him of using the Justice Department’s powers to make Trump’s offer, undermining the probe into Russia and promoting right-wing conspiracy theories. But in the last two weeks, Barr has become a new hero for the Liberals because he demystified and aggressively condemned Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. The Democratic Party committee has cited excerpts from Barr’s testimony more than any other witness to date, and has interviewed more than 1,000 people as part of their lengthy investigation. These clips established Barr as the top official in the Trump administration to confirm the legitimacy of the election results and to deny Trump’s relentless effort to claim that the election was marred by fraud. During Monday’s hearing, Barr debunked Trump-backed allegations of illegal “dumping of ballots” in Detroit, Dominion’s nationwide ballot rigging and other conspiracy theories. Without prompting, Barr did his best to criticize “2,000 Mules,” the film made by right-wing activist Dines D’Souza, a convicted criminal who claims the 2020 election was stolen. (In a deposition clip played Monday, Barr laughed at the film and said it was “completely devoid of” evidence.) Barr said the theories Trump advocated were “stupid” and “amateurish” and “cut off from reality.” This rhetoric is strikingly close to what leading Democrats have been saying about Trump’s allegations of fraud. To be clear, Barr is still a hardline conservative. Just a few weeks ago, he made several false allegations in an interview with Fox News about the Trump-Russia investigation and supported Trump’s baseless claims that the whole investigation was a fabricated “prank” committed by Democratic agents and the FBI.

One of the main focus areas of Monday’s hearing was to highlight the idea that Trump and some of his allies continued to make false allegations of electoral fraud after being told personally that the allegations were not legal. The commission argued that Trump had been repeatedly told by his own top officials, including Barr and Stepien, that the myriad allegations of fraud he was pressing were unfounded and certainly not evidence that the election had been rigged. “I specifically set up the Dominion voting machines, which I found to be one of the most troubling allegations – embarrassing in the sense that I saw absolutely no basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a dramatic way that they obviously affected a lot of people in the audience.” , Barr said during his testimony, according to a video that aired on Monday. However, Trump and some of his allies continued to make these false allegations until January, in which the commission tried to show that it was a bad faith attempt to overthrow the election, despite being repeatedly told that these allegations were not valid. During their confrontation at the Oval Office in December 2020, Barr said Trump gave him a report claiming to be “absolute proof” that the Dominion voting machines had been tampered with. Barr said the report “seemed very amateurish to me” and “saw no evidence to support” the allegations of fraud. Barr will step down in December 2020 shortly after his last meeting with Trump and was replaced by Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who also faced a similar barrage of pressure from the former president to investigate the same baseless allegations of electoral fraud. had warned him that they were unfounded. . Eventually, Trump considered replacing Rosen with a relatively obscure environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, who had shown a willingness to pursue fraud allegations that would not have been made by other senior Justice Department officials. Clark drafted a “Proof of Concept note” for the reversal of the 2020 election and sent it to senior Justice Department officials on December 28, 2020, two weeks after Barr’s resignation. This note relied heavily on many of the same demystified allegations of fraud that had already told Trump they had no value. At the same time, Trump’s allies are pressing the Justice Department to refer Trump’s stolen election claims to the Supreme Court in a bid to prevent the counting of results by many key states. A briefing sent to Rosen and other senior Justice Department officials by Trump’s White House aide reported the same allegations of misconduct at the Michigan polling station that Barr had told Trump he was an “amateur” and did not include any supporting information.

The committee focuses on the “Team Normal” controversy against Rudy

The commission focused on Monday’s testimony, which distinguished between two groups advising Trump in the days after the election: the “Normal Group” and those who were with Rudy Giuliani, making baseless allegations of voter fraud. “We called them my team and Rudy’s team,” Stepien said in a video played by the committee. “I did not mind being a member of Team Normal.” The commission found the gap on election night when Stepien and others told Trump it was too early to announce the race, while Giuliani told him to declare victory. “The president disagreed with that. I do not remember the specific words. He thought I was wrong. He told me that,” Stepien said in a conversation with Trump on election night. “And that it was going to go in a different direction.” The committee worked to undermine the outrageous allegations made by Giuliani and Sidney Powell about vote-rigging and foreign involvement – all of which were untrue. They showed videos of Giuliani and Powell’s statements confronting officials such as Barr and Stepien, saying the allegations were simply nonsense. The commission even looked at Giuliani and his mental state on election night, playing videos from the testimony of Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller, where he said Giuliani “had too much to drink.” “I mean, the mayor was definitely drunk,” Miller said. “But I did not know the level of his toxic intoxication when he spoke to the President, for example.”

The committee reveals details of the investigation into the campaign finances

One of the key details revealed by the Jan. 6 committee during Monday’s hearing was how Trump’s election lies turned into millions of dollars in fundraising for Trump’s campaign and the post-election political action committee. . The panel argued that Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud combined with his campaign fundraising efforts – resulting in a $ 250 million donation to Trump and his allies, including calls for a “formal election defense fund.” which did not exist. “The ‘Big Lie’ was also a big failure,” California MP Zoe Lofgren said during Monday’s hearing. During the commission’s investigation, he went to court to try to look for loose financial documents such as bank records linked to January 6th.