The House committee probing the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol on Monday held its second public hearing, in which it accused former President Donald Trump of lying purposely to the public in order to stay in power and raise money from sympathetic supporters, an orchestrated effort the panel said led directly to the attack.
The select committee leaned heavily on the testimony of some of the leading figures in Trump’s political orbit to hammer home the notion that, not only were Trump’s claims of rampant voter fraud false, but also that he knew them to be so, reported The Hill.
Leading the charge was former Attorney General William Barr, who claimed Trump became increasingly “detached from reality” following the election.
Barr said his Justice Department was forced to play “whack-a-mole” with the flood of false fraud allegations pouring in from Trump supporters around the country. One by one, the department investigated the claims but found no wrongdoing, he said.
The accusation that Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company, had installed software to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden was “idiotic,” Barr said, while another claim — that more people voted in Philadelphia than there are voters in the city — was “absolute rubbish.”
“And I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bullshit, I mean, that the claims of fraud were bulls**t,” Barr told the committee in an earlier interview that was aired during Monday’s hearing. “And, you know, he was indignant about that.”
Testimony presented Monday showed a clear fracture behind the scenes between Trump and some of his top aides, who told the committee they confronted Trump directly about his claims of widespread fraud in the weeks after the 2020 election, only to be ignored.
The committee used video clips of Trump making claims of rampant fraud and contrasted them with interviews with White House and campaign aides disputing those assertions.
Former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue testified that he personally explained to Trump that Justice Department officials had looked into claims of fraud in Georgia, Nevada and elsewhere but that much of the information the president was receiving was inaccurate. In response, Trump would shift his focus to other claims of fraud.
“There were so many allegations that when you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight you on it, he’d move to another one,” Donoghue said, according to The Hill.
Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, who was promoted to that role in July 2020, was scheduled to testify in-person on Monday but backed out after his wife went into labor.
In his absence, the committee used clips of Stepien’s private deposition, in which he discussed his effort to convince Trump of the benefits of mail-in voting, of the amount of time it would take to count ballots and declare a winner in the 2020 election and of the need to let votes be counted before declaring victory.
“My recommendation was to say that votes are still being counted. It’s too early to tell, too early to call the race,” he said, adding, “I don’t recall the particular words. He thought I was wrong. He told me so and, you know, that they were going to, he was going to go in a different direction.”
Trump instead relied on the counsel of Rudy Giuliani, according to the report.
The committee used footage of Giuliani on Fox News and appearing before a Pennsylvania panel claiming dead people had voted for Biden in large numbers and that ballots were brought in to erase Trump’s lead in Michigan, both of which were dispelled by witnesses on Monday.
“There were two groups, my team and Rudy’s team. I didn’t mind being part of ‘Team Normal,'” Stepien told the committee, saying he did not believe the tactics encouraged by Giuliani were “honest or professional.”
In a surprising moment in Monday’s hearing, the panel showed former Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller testifying that Giuliani was “definitely intoxicated” on election night.
The committee held its first public hearing last Thursday, with members laying out their case against Trump to show how he relentlessly pushed his false claims of a rigged election despite multiple advisers telling him otherwise and how he intensified an extraordinary scheme to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.
Thursday’s hearing included a video deposition by Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who said she accepted then-Attorney General Bill Barr's statement that the Justice Department found no fraud sufficient to overturn the election.
The former President responded to his daughter’s comments on Friday and said, "Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!)."