Nearly all of his close advisers told Donald Trump that he had lost the 2020 U.S. election, and yet he continued to insist he had been robbed, a congressional committee has heard.
The panel that investigated the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol showed the testimony of several witnesses at its last hearing on Tuesday, including Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House attorney, who met with committee investigators last week.
According to Cipollone and other witnesses, almost everyone closest to the former president believed that there was no hope of challenging the election result after December 14, 2020, the day the polling station voters met to certify the election results.
“I thought I had to grant the election at that time? Yes, I did,” Cipollone said in a snippet of his testimony shown during the hearing.
He added: “There was not enough evidence of electoral fraud to change the outcome of the election. When other people kept suggesting that there was, the answer was, ‘What is it?’ At some point you have to hold on or shut up, that was my opinion. “
Liz Cheney, the committee’s Republican vice president, said there could be no excuse for Trump to continue to push his false claims.
“Donald Trump had access to more detailed and specific information that showed that the election was not really stolen than almost any other American,” he said. “No rational or sensible man in his position could ignore this information and come to the opposite conclusion.”
However, there were some Trump advisers who wanted him to insist on his challenge, prompting what was described as a shout-out party during a White House meeting in December 2020.
On one side were Trump’s attorney, Sidney Powell, Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com, and Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser. They wanted the former president to appoint Powell as special adviser to investigate conspiracy theories that foreign governments had helped change the results that were recorded on automatic voting machines.
The other side included Cipollone, Eric Herschmann, another White House lawyer and White House aide Derek Lyons, who urged the president to reject these conspiracy theories.
Herschmann told the committee, “It got to the point that the screams were completely, completely out. When you let people in. It was late at night and it was a long day and what they were proposing I thought was crazy.
The meeting ended after midnight, according to witnesses. Less than two hours later, Trump sent a tweet: “Great protest in DC on January 6. Be there, it will be wild!”
That tweet “electrified and galvanized his supporters, especially the dangerous extremists of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and other white racist and nationalist groups who do damage to fight the government,” said Jamie Raskin, a Democratic committee member.
The committee presented multiple proofs that Trump’s call to his supporters to march on the Capitol was well planned, although at the time it was presented as spontaneous.
One was a draft tweet, which was shown to Trump but never sent, which said, “I’m going to make a big speech at 10 a.m. on January 6 at the Ellipse (south of the House “Please come soon, massive crowds are expected. Then head to the Capitol.”
The committee has spent the past year investigating last year’s attack when a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the official certification of Joe Biden’s election victory.
Members have held six public hearings in which they have described how Trump insisted the election had been rigged, even though his closest collaborators told him it was not. State and federal officials have testified about being pressured by Trump to stop the power transition and investigate his allegations of election fraud, even though he was repeatedly told they were false.
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In one of the most explosive hearings, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, described how Trump had attacked Secret Service agents on Jan. 6 as they tried to prevent him from going to meet with his supporters at the Capitol.
The committee is scheduled for another hearing next week as members consider new evidence and possible witnesses.
Over the weekend, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon said he would testify, having previously resisted doing so. Next week he will be tried for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the commission of documents and witnesses. The Justice Department has described Bannon’s offer as a “last attempt to avoid liability.”
Committee officials said Monday they still wanted him to testify and provide the documents they had requested.