Jonathan Ernst | Reuters The House Electoral Commission investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol said it had discovered that former President Donald Trump’s defense fund never existed. “The selection committee found that there was no such fund,” said Amanda Wick, a senior investigator on the commission investigating the insurgency. New evidence presented to the public during the hearing showed two former Trump campaign officials disagreeing during the testimony that the fund ever existed. “I do not believe there is a fund called the Electoral Defense Fund,” said Hannah Olred, who was identified by the commission as a former Trump campaign executive, in a recorded statement. Gary Cobby, Trump’s former director of digital campaigning, told the committee that the defense fund was part of a marketing ploy. Trump’s campaign regularly sought to raise money after the former president’s defeat in the November 2020 election, encouraging donors to donate to what they called “official election fund.” The commission found that the Trump campaign and its allies raised nearly $ 100 million in the first week after the election. – Brian Schwartz
Former Philadelphia City Commissioner: After Trump wrote to me on Twitter with my name, the threats became “much more graphic”
Former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt testifies during a hearing by the Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol at the Cannon House office building on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images Former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Smith told the select committee that the threats against him became “much more graphic” and began to include details about his family after then-President Donald Trump criticized him in a tweet. Schmidt, a Republican official in charge of overseeing the 2020 Philadelphia election, dismissed some of Trump’s allegations of fraud in a 60 Minutes interview shortly after the election. Trump responded to a tweet: “A guy named Al Schmidt, the Philadelphia Commissioner and the so-called Republican (RINO), is widely used by the Fake News media to explain how honest things were about the Philadelphia election. refuses to look at a mountain of corruption and dishonesty. We win! “ Schmidt said he had already received threats as part of his job. But after Trump called him by name, “the threats became much more specific, much more graphic and included not only me by name, but included members of my family by name, age, address, photos of our home, “Just about every little detail you can imagine,” Schmidt told the selection committee. “That changed with this tweet,” he said. – Kevin Breuninger
Barr repeatedly accuses Trump of allegations of electoral fraud as “bulls —“, “crazy”, “nonsense”
Former United States Attorney General Bill Barr appears on video as he testifies at a public hearing of the U.S. House Selection Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol, Hill Capitol in Washington, DC, June 9th. 2022. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters Former Attorney General William Barr has repeatedly and colorfully dismissed a wide range of voter fraud conspiracies by Trump and some of his allies after his defeat in the 2020 election, according to video interviews with the commission. Barr grabbed some of these conspiracy theories as “bulls —“, “nonsense”, “stupid” and “crazy things” and said he told Trump bluntly after the election that the allegations “do not disappear”. Headed the Ministry of Justice from 14 February 2019 until 23 December 2020, The panel played an excerpt with Barr narrating a meeting at the Oval Office a few weeks after the November 3, 2020 election, in which he had to tell Trump that the Justice Department “is not an extension of your legal team” and can not be used. to “take a stand in the election” by investigating allegations of fraud. “We will look at something that is specific, credible and could have affected the outcome of the election, and we do that and it just is not worthwhile, they do not go away,” he said. After seeing Trump spread the allegations on Fox News, Barr told an Associated Press reporter on December 1, 2020, that the Justice Department has not seen fraud on a scale that could affect the outcome of the election. When he later met with Trump, Barr said he thought he was going to be fired, telling the committee, “the president was as crazy as I have ever seen him.” The then president accused him of making the statement “because you hate Trump.” Elsewhere, Barr recalled, “I told him that the things his people were shoveling in public were bulls —. I mean, the allegations of fraud were bulls —. And he was outraged about that.” “I reiterated that they had wasted a whole month on these allegations on these Dominion voting machines, and they were stupid allegations.” Barr said he found that these allegations, that the Dominion voting machines were set up to reverse the vote for Joe Biden, were “disturbing” as “I saw absolutely no basis” for them. “But they were done in such an impressive way that they obviously affected a lot of the audience,” even though it was “complete nonsense,” Barr said. “I told him it was crazy and that they were wasting their time on it and that he was doing a serious disservice to the country,” Barr said. – Kevin Breuninger
Trump’s former campaign manager says he and McCarthy tried to convince Trump that his ballots were OK
Video of an interview with former President Trump’s campaign manager William Stepien (L) and his lawyer Kevin Marino, played during a hearing by the Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol in the building Cannon House offices on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images Former Trump campaign leader Bill Stepien told the committee that he and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy met with Trump to convince him that mail-order ballots were not at high risk. The former governor-in-chief discouraged voters from using them. “We thought it was because we thought mail-order voting, mail-order voting, was not bad for his campaign, but, you know, the president’s mind had decided,” Stepien said in a new statement presented at the hearing. . The meeting with Trump took place in the summer of 2020, as the president publicly broke the idea of postal ballots being used for voting during the coronavirus pandemic. “The ballot box is a very dangerous thing for this country, because it’s a scammer,” Trump said in a White House briefing that year. – Brian Schwartz
“Definitely drunk” Rudy Giuliani says Trump should declare victory on election night, says campaign aide
Former Trump campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani appears on screen during a hearing by the Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. Saul Loeb | AFP | Getty Images Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was “definitely drunk” on the night of the 2020 election when he told the White House that then-President Donald Trump should simply declare victory over Joe Biden, a former Trump aide told Jason Miller. Miller said he noticed that Giuliani was drunk when he and other officials, including former campaign chief Bill Stepien and then-Chief of Staff Mark Mendowe, gathered at the White House to hear what Giuliani was saying to Giuliani. “The mayor was definitely drunk, but I did not know his level of intoxication when he spoke to the president, for example,” Miller said as part of an interview with the select committee, excerpts of which were played at the hearing. “There were suggestions from, I think it was Mayor Giuliani, to go and declare victory and say we had won it completely,” Miller said. He said he remembers saying at the time that Trump should not declare victory until the numbers became clearer. “Giuliani was essentially saying, ‘We won, we’re being robbed, where all the votes come from, we have to say we’ve won,’ and basically anyone who disagreed with that position was weak,” Miller told researchers. In a separate interview, Stepien told the committee it was “too early” to make any such statement. Trump, in the early hours of November 4, 2020, falsely claimed, “honestly, we won this election.” – Kevin Breuninger
The “big lie” was also the “big bang,” Lofgren says of Trump’s fundraising.
U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) speaks during the second public hearing of the U.S. House Selection Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the United States Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, 13 June 2022. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters MP Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif, a member of the House of Representatives Select Committee on January 6, says they plan to show how the Trump campaign erupted in support of their supporters, persuading them to contribute to their legal fight against the 2020 election results. . Lofgren says donors were deceived and many of these contributions were not used in the final legal battle. “We will also show how Trump’s campaign used these false allegations of electoral fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who said their donations were for the legal battle,” Lofgren said. “But Trump’s campaign did not use the money for that. The big lie was also a big batch.” – Brian Schwartz
