These are the key points of this month’s second panel hearing on Trump’s efforts to cancel the 2020 election and the violence at the Capitol on January 6th.
The committee surprised many observers on Sunday when it announced that Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, would testify in person at Monday’s hearing. But Stepien had a surprise of his own on Monday morning, when he learned that his wife was suffering, so he withdrew from the hearing.
This whirlwind of events forced the committee to fight, and they handled it skillfully, albeit after a 45-minute delay.
Obviously, lawmakers and committee staff were prepared with video clips of Stepien’s private statement. And they reproduced many images of his testimony Monday, revealing new details about his talks with Trump and how he advised the president not to declare victory prematurely on election night.
Somehow, the result gave more power to the Democratic committee to control what the public heard from Stepien. He was not in the room to say his work, which could have included some Trump defenses and some revolts against the committee. Instead, the panel could pick and choose which deposition clips it played and focused like a laser on the material most harmful to Trump.
Long depositions take the place of witnesses
Stepien’s testimony was not the only use the committee made of Monday’s statements. The panel reproduced long excerpts from former Attorney General William Barr’s statement to the committee, describing in detail why Trump’s allegations of fraud were “false” and why he has not seen anything since. convince him that there was fraud.
“There was never an indication of interest in what the real facts were,” Barr said in a video of his statement, which was played on Monday. “I was a little demoralized, because I thought, ‘Boy, if you really believe in these things, you’ve lost touch with – you’ve become detached from reality if you really believe in these things.’ “
The committee did not invite Barr to testify publicly for Monday’s hearing, but the record of his statement that was played made him sometimes feel like he was there.
The video footage also gave the committee a chance to show the testimony of other people in Trump’s inner circle, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, without having to take them to testify. And just by showing video footage, the committee controls which sound notes are emitted.
The audience illustrates the key role Barr played in setting the tone for “Team Normal,” the group of campaign and White House officials trying to warn Trump that the allegations of fraud were false.
It is not for lack of trying to find fraud. Barr had issued a controversial note weeks earlier that allowed prosecutors to examine election crime claims even before the vote was certified. Barr’s move had led to the resignation of a senior public health official from the Justice Department. Barr looked for fraud and did not find it.
Barr becomes the chief denier
Democrats insulted Barr when he was in office, accusing him of exercising the powers of the Justice Department to carry out Trump’s orders, undermining Russia’s investigation, and pushing right-wing conspiracy theories. But over the past two weeks, Barr has become a kind of new hero for the Liberals, for aggressively denying and condemning Trump’s lies about the 2020 election.
The Democratic committee has presented clips of Barr’s statement more than any other witness to date, and has interviewed more than 1,000 people as part of his investigation over a year. These clips have established Barr as the highest official in the Trump administration to assert the legitimacy of the election results and disprove Trump’s relentless effort to claim that the election was tainted by fraud.
During Monday’s hearing, Barr dismantled Trump-backed specific claims about illegal “vote dumps” in Detroit, national-level vote manipulation by Dominion with its election machines, and other conspiracy theories.
Without asking, Barr even went to great lengths to criticize “2,000 Mules,” the film created by right-wing activist Dinesh D’Souza, a convicted felon who claims the 2020 election was stolen . (In a deposition clip played Monday, Barr laughed at the film and said it “completely lacked” evidence).
Barr said the theories Trump supported were “stupid” and “amateurish” and “unrelated to reality.” This rhetoric is surprisingly close to what leading Democrats have said about Trump’s allegations of fraud.
To be clear, Barr is still a hard-line conservative. Just a few weeks ago, he made several false claims in a Fox News interview about the Trump-Russia investigation, and backed up Trump’s baseless claims that the entire investigation was an invented “deception” perpetrated by Democratic agents and the FBI.
The Committee argues that Trump filed allegations of bad faith fraud after he was personally told that they were not legitimate.
One of the main areas of focus at Monday’s hearing was to highlight the idea that Trump and some of his allies continued to place false allegations of election fraud after they were personally told that such allegations were not legitimate. .
The committee argued that his senior officials, including Barr and Stepien, had repeatedly told Trump that the myriad allegations of fraud he was pushing were unfounded and certainly not evidence that the election had been stolen.
“I specifically raised Dominion voting machines, which I found to be among the most disturbing, disturbing complaints in the sense that I saw an absolutely zero basis for the complaints, but they were done in such a sensational way that, they obviously influenced a lot of people, members of the public, “Barr said during a statement, according to a video played Monday.
However, Trump and some of his allies continued to push these false claims throughout January in which the committee tried to prove it was a bad faith effort to cancel the election even though they were constantly told. that these statements were invalid.
During his confrontation at the Oval Office in December 2020, Barr said Trump gave him a report stating “absolute proof” that Dominion’s voting machines had been tampered with. Barr said the report “seemed very amateurish to me” and “did not see any supporting information” for the fraud claims.
Barr would resign in December 2020 shortly after his last meeting with Trump and was replaced by acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, who also faced similar pressure from the former president to investigate the same allegations of unfounded election fraud that Barr had warned her that they were unfounded. .
Finally, Trump considered replacing Rosen with a relatively obscure environmental lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, who had shown a willingness to prosecute fraud allegations that other senior DOJ officials would not.
Clark drafted a “proof of concept note” to cancel the 2020 election and sent it to top Justice Department officials on December 28, 2020, two weeks after Barr’s resignation. That note was largely based on many of the same false allegations of fraud that Trump had already been told had no merit.
At the same time, Trump’s allies were pressuring the Justice Department to bring Trump’s stolen false election claims to the Supreme Court in an effort to prevent the outcome of several key oscillating states from being counted. The letter sent to Rosen and other senior DOJ officials by Trump’s personal assistant in the White House cited the same report on Michigan voting machine irregularities that Barr said Trump was “an amateur” and did not include no supporting information.
The committee focuses on the “Team Normal” vs. Rudy showdown
The committee focused on Monday’s testimony that distinguished between two groups advising Trump in the days after the election: “Team Normal” and those with Rudy Giuliani pushing baseless allegations of election fraud.
“We called them my team and Rudy’s team,” Stepien said in a deposition video played by the committee. “I didn’t mind being characterized as part of the Normal team.”
The committee traced the division back to election night, when Stepien and others told Trump it was too early to call for a run, while Giuliani told him to declare victory.
“The president didn’t agree with that. I don’t remember the words in particular. He thought I was wrong. He told me,” Stepien said of a conversation with Trump on election night. “And that was going in another direction.”
The committee worked to undermine the savage claims made by Giuliani and Sidney Powell about the change of votes and the participation of foreign countries, all of which are false. They showed a video of Giuliani and Powell’s statements juxtaposed with officials like Barr and Stepien saying the allegations were simply nonsense.
The committee even investigated Giuliani and his mood on election night, playing a video of Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller’s statement that Giuliani “should drink too”.
“I mean, the mayor was definitely intoxicated,” Miller said. “But he didn’t know his level of toxic poisoning when he spoke to the president, for example.”
The committee reveals details of the campaign finance investigation
One of the key details the January 6 committee revealed during Monday’s hearing was how Trump’s lies about the election turned into millions of dollars in fundraising for the Trump campaign and the election committee. ‘political action he created after the election.
The panel argued that Trump’s false allegations about election fraud fit in with his campaign’s fundraising effort, resulting in $ 250 million given to Trump and his allies, including the demands. requested for an “official electoral defense fund” that did not exist.
“The ‘big lie’ was also a big scam,” California Democrat Zoe Lofgren said during Monday’s hearing.
During the committee’s investigation, he went to court to try to remove loose financial documents such as bank records that were related to January 6 …