The menu was lavish.
When William P. Barr resigned as Attorney General in December 2020, he praised President Donald J. Trump for his “unprecedented accomplishments” and promised that the Justice Department would continue to pursue the president’s allegations of election fraud. ensure integrity “. of the elections ”.
A year and a half later, Mr. Barr sounds different. In video-recorded testimony at the first two public hearings by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 bombing of the Capitol, Americans have now learned what Mr. Barr refrained from saying publicly about Mr. Trump at the time.
“I was a little demoralized,” Mr. Barr in a testimony reproduced Monday, describing his reaction to a monologue by Mr. Trump in December 2020 that the voting machines were manipulated. The thought of Mr. Barr, he said, was that the president had “disconnected from reality if he really believes these things. On the other hand, when I got into this and told him how crazy some of these allegations were, he never went to have an indication of interest in what the real facts were. “
The testimony of Mr. Barr and that of several assistants played in the audience were a sincere and more brutal version of what they said in public shortly after the election.
Bill Trumpien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, and Jason Miller, a senior adviser, told the committee that they could not keep Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, away from him on the night of the elections. Mr. Giuliani, whom Miller described as “definitely intoxicated,” told Trump he should declare victory. “It was too early to make any such calls,” Mr. Stepien.
Stepien also stated that after the election it became clear that Trump had no realistic way to cancel the election.
But in the days immediately following the vote, he did not publicly challenge Mr. Trump and Mr. Giuliani. And two days after Election Day, Mr. Miller raised the idea in a call with reporters that mysterious bags of ballot papers were appearing in the states that Mr. Trump was still arguing.
Review the issues of the January 6 House Committee hearings
They both seemed to believe that there was an opportunity for the challenges that passed in mid-November. Both continued to work with the campaign, but withdrew from the vanguard when Mr. Trump put Mr. Giuliani in charge of efforts to nullify the results.
The change in some of the aides reflects the legal consequences of lying to a congressional committee, and how much the control of Mr. Trump on his former aides in the 17 months he has been out of office.
The testimony so far only reflects what has been made public, and it is unclear what else the committee may have. In books written about last year’s election, Mr. Trump is shown as believing that the data showed a likely victory until the afternoon of November 5, when they changed.
Mr. Barr, who testified voluntarily before the committee, spoke in minutes with Jonathan Karl of ABC News in 2021 about his exasperation with Mr. Fraud’s allegations of fraud. Trump. Mr. Barr also explained the tense private conversations with Mr. Trump in his memoirs this year.
In other cases, people like Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka, began to look at a life after the White House in Florida, while remaining within the administration. They tried to consolidate the political issues they had been working on and, according to their colleagues, said little to try to dissuade Mr. Trump from trying to stay in power.
However, they remained silent in public as the president, his advisers and political allies pushed the claims against the Americans and used them to raise funds for Mr. Trump.
“After the election, his own people have advised him not to go out and declare victory, that it took time for the votes to come,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who led the second round of questioning. committee hearing on Monday.
He added: “They told the president directly over and over again that they were fake. That was his people. This is Trump World, telling the president that what he was saying was false. And he kept saying the same thing.”
The testimony of Mr. Barr alleged that a former senior cabinet official who was struggling with the series of baseless allegations by Mr. Barr. Trump on fraud he wanted his government to ruin.
“It was like playing Whac-a-Mole because one day something would come out and the next day it would be another problem,” Mr. Barr. He also detailed in his testimony how he told an Associated Press reporter on December 1 that the department had found no evidence of widespread fraud that would have changed the election result.
Still, his resignation letter underscored the degree to which officials seemed to believe they had to walk on tiptoe around Mr. Trump.
But the testimony of Mr. Stepien and Mr. Miller made it clear that they had at least tried to warn Mr. Trump was likely to go to election night, with early returns in his favor, but a possible wave of Democratic votes coming later when the mail-in ballots were counted.
“I recounted that conversation with him in which I said, as I said in 2016, that it would be a long night,” Stepien recalled speaking to the president. “I told him in 2020 that, you know, there was, it would be a process again. As you know, the first returns will be, you know, positive. Then, you know, we’ll be seeing the return of the ballots , because, you know, they came later. “
Miller said that when the campaign found out on election night that Fox News had called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr., he and other campaign assistants were angry and disappointed, but also worried “that maybe our data or our numbers are inaccurate. ”
But in the call with reporters two days after election day, Mr. Stepien seems inflexible. “The media and the privileged people of this city have been trying to rule out Donald Trump for years,” he said. “Donald Trump is alive and well.”
At another time, he said, “It’s exactly what the president said would happen.”