The panel’s second hearing focused on what a committee aide described as “Trump’s big lie” – a collection of outrageous theories and accusations that Mr. Trump and his allies attacked to justify his election victory. . While Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien was due to testify Monday, he did not show up because his wife started giving birth shortly before the hearing began. Instead, the jury presented a collection of videos depicting statements by Mr. Stepien and other Trump campaign and administration officials during affidavits during the jury’s investigation. Each of the witnesses testified that Mr. Trump was informed that he was not the winner of the 2020 election when he went to the east room of the White House in the early morning hours of November 4, the morning after the 2020 election. At the time, Mr. Trump claimed, “Honestly, we won this election, in fact,” and argued that the late ballots for Joe Biden – the result of ballots counted by mail until late at night – were falsified. But at the time, he and his closest aides knew he did not have it, according to testimonies. In part of the recorded testimony, Mr. Stepien recalled saying he had previously told Trump that election night would be “a big night,” just as it was in 2016. “I told him in 2020 that, you know, there were – it was going to be a process again as, you know, early returns will be, you know, positive, and we’ll be, you know, watching ballot returns as they came out then,” he said. “I told him it would be a process. “It would be, you know – you know we have to wait and see how that happened.” However, Mr. Trump did not wait, but chose to repeat an argument he had made for weeks in the election campaign, that the Democrats were planning to steal the election with the help of fake postal ballots. The former president had been informed of such an argument by Mr Stepien, who told the selection committee that he had gone so far as to seek the help of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to explain to Mr Trump how the ballot box could be a blessing to Mr. Trump. hopes of re-election. Mr Stepien told the panel that he and Mr McCarthy had told the then president that the GOP ‘s power in the local organization could translate into an advantage in the postal vote if Mr Trump started telling his supporters to vote by mail. However, the veteran Republican agent said Mr. Trump’s mind was “decided” and the idea of encouraging mail-order voting was rejected. Trump was also informed that the traditional power of the Republican Party on election day, in contrast to the traditional power of the Democrats in the absentee ballot, would cause a phenomenon known as “red reflection”, in which early election returns seem to give him significant advantage. but this advantage could be erased as the absentee ballots were opened and registered. He was also told that such an effect would be even more pronounced in states such as Pennsylvania, where state law prohibits election officials from even opening postal ballots before polls close on election day. His decision to claim victory on election night appeared to have confused then-Attorney General William Barr, who said Trump had raised the specter of fraud “before any evidence could be found.” “It seemed to be based on the dynamic that – at the end of the night came a lot of Democratic votes, which changed the number of votes in some states. “And that seemed to be the basis for this widespread claim that there was a big fraud,” Barr recalled. He added that he “did not think much” about Trump’s allegations of fraud at the time “because people were talking for weeks and everyone understood for weeks that this was going to happen on election night.” The adviser Trump listened to most on election night was a “drunk” former New York mayor While Trump’s campaign manager advised him not to claim victory while the ballots were being counted, he chose to follow the advice of his personal lawyer, former New York mayor Rudolf Giuliani. According to another Trump campaign aide, Jason Miller, Giuliani appeared at the White House’s home drunk and began pressuring campaign officials to tell Trump to declare himself the winner that night. “The mayor was definitely drunk, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke to the president,” said Miller. “There were suggestions, I think it was Mayor Giuliani to go and declare victory and say that we won it completely.” “Mayor Giuliani said we won, we are being robbed; we must say we won,” he recalled, adding that Giuliani was “essentially” arguing that “anyone who disagreed with this position was weak.” The former New York mayor’s insistence that the fraud was to blame for Trump becoming the first U.S. president to lose his re-election bid in decades has come in the face of all U.S. Justice Department officials – including Mr. Barr – they had already determined. In a taped testimony, the former attorney general recalled a controversial meeting with the then president, in which he bluntly explained that there was no truth to what he and Mr. Giuliani were claiming. “I told him that the things his people were shoveling in public were bulls *** – I mean the allegations of fraud were bulls ***,” he said. He called the allegations “stupid” and “completely nonsense”. Barr also told the select committee that he was “immoral” by the former president’s insistence that his loss was due to fraud because he thought Trump had “moved away from reality if he really believed these things.” He added that Mr. Trump “never” showed “an interest in the facts [were]”. But the wholehearted acceptance of Mr. Giuliani’s baseless allegations of fraud made him so dear to Trump that he allowed Giuliani to undertake his campaign effort to challenge the election in court. Together with another lawyer, Sidney Powell, they began to claim that the voting machines made by Dominion Voting Systems – the voting machines used in many states lost by Trump – had been used to rig elections by changing votes from Trump to Biden. They even went so far as to claim that the machines had been developed on the orders of the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez with the explicit purpose of rigging the elections. Ms. Powell’s other claims included an even more bizarre theory that servers in Germany had been used to camouflage how Dominion machines had transmitted votes to Mr Biden. None of what they claimed was true. A White House deputy adviser to the Trump administration, Eric Hersman, described his assessment of the allegations made by Giuliani and Ms. Powell in particularly blunt terms. “I thought what they were proposing was crazy. The theory was also completely crazy, right? “A combination of Italians, Germans, different things that float about who is involved,” he said. Despite the reservations of the Trump campaign’s original legal team, Mr. Giuliani continued to make false allegations of fraud in multiple lawsuits, including his first appearance in a Pennsylvania courtroom in late 2020, his first in decades. However, he failed to persuade any judge to take his claims seriously, and in 2021 a New York State court suspended his lawyer’s license because he repeatedly made false statements in court. Mr Giuliani, who has also testified before the jury in a videotaped statement, said he was drunk on election night during a Monday appearance on the podcast of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room. He said Mary Cheney, a conservative LGBT + rights activist, was “completely hysterical”, apparently confusing her with her sister, Liz Cheney, a select vice-chair of the commission (who had described him as “obviously drunk” in the opening remarks). . The embarrassed former mayor also suggested that Ashli Babbitt, a pro-Trump rioter who was shot and killed by a Capitol police officer as he tried to invade the House of Representatives’s lobby, was killed by “Antifa” police instead of . The commission also heard that Mr. Trump raised $ 250 million (20 206 million) in small donations to his “Official Election Defense Fund” – but the fund did not exist and “most” of that money ended up given to its own political action committee. Spokeswoman Joey Lofgren said: “Throughout the commission we have found evidence that Trump’s campaign and its successors have misled donors into where their funds will go and what they will be used for. So, not only was there a big lie, there was also a big upset. “ The next in a series of televised public hearings by the January 6 committee will take place on Wednesday at 10 a.m. Eastern time. It is expected to focus on allegations that Mr. Trump tried to pressure the Justice Department to support his false allegations of electoral fraud.
