Panel to assert Trump knew he lost
Hearings into bid to overturn vote to resume next week
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump was told the same thing over and over, by his campaign team, the data crunchers, and a steady stream of lawyers, investigators and inner-circle allies: There was no voting fraud that could have tipped the 2020 presidential election.
But in the eight weeks after losing to Joe Biden, the defeated Trump publicly, privately and relentlessly pushed his false claims of a rigged 2020 election and intensified an extraordinary scheme to overturn Biden’s victory. When all else failed in his effort to stay in power, Trump beckoned thousands of his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, where extremists groups led the deadly U.S. Capitol siege.
The scale and virulence of that scheme began to take shape Thursday evening at the opening House hearing investigating events surrounding Jan. 6. When the panel resumes Monday, it will delve into its findings that Trump and his advisers knew early on that he had in fact lost the election but engaged in a “massive effort” to spread false information to convince the public otherwise.
Biden spoke of the importance of the committee’s investigation in remarks Friday in Los Angeles. “The insurrection on Jan. 6 was one of the darkest chapters in our nation’s history,” the president said, “a brutal assault on our democracy.”
Americans, he said, must “understand what truly happened and to understand that the same forces that led to Jan. 6 remain at work today.”
The House panel investigating the attack on the Capitol is prepared next week to reveal more details and testimony about its assessment that Trump was made well aware of his election loss. With testimony from some 1,000 interviews and 140,000 documents over the yearlong probe, it will lay out how Trump was told repeatedly that there were no hidden ballots, rigged voting machines or support for his other outlandish claims. Nevertheless Trump refused to accept defeat and his desperate attempt to cling to the presidency resulted in the most violent domestic attack on the Capitol in history.
“Over multiple months, Donald Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power,” Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., told the hearing Thursday night.
“Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States,” she said.
On Wednesday, the panel will hear testimony from the highest levels of the
Trump-era Department of Justice — Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, his top deputy Richard Donoghue and Steven Engel, the former head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel — according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss their appearances.
The testimony from the three former Justice Department officials is expected to center on a chaotic stretch in the final weeks of the administration when Trump openly weighed the idea of replacing Rosen with a lower-ranking official, Jeffrey Clark, who was seen as more willing to champion in court the president’s false claims of voter fraud.
The situation came to a head in an hourslong meeting at the White House on Jan. 3, 2021, attended by Rosen, Donoghue, Engel and Clark, when top Justice Department officials and White House lawyers told Trump they would resign if he went ahead with his plan to replace Rosen. The president ultimately let Rosen finish out the administration as acting attorney general.
Thursday will turn to Trump’s remarkable efforts to press Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on Jan. 6, a scheme proposed at the
White House by an outside lawyer, John Eastman. During the insurrection, rioters prowled the halls of the Capitol shouting, “Hang Mike Pence!” when the vice president refused Trump’s plan to overturn the 2020 election.
Early Friday, Trump responded on his social media site, decrying the “WITCH HUNT!” even as he fully acknowledged he refused to accept defeat.
“Many people spoke to me about the Election results, both pro and con, but I never wavered one bit,” he said, pushing his false claim of a stolen election.
Trump also dismissed testimony from his daughter Ivanka Trump, who served as a senior adviser in his administration, that was shown during Thursday’s hearing.
In the testimony, Ivanka Trump said she was influenced by a Dec. 1, 2020, statement by William Barr, then the attorney general, that there was no widespread fraud that had altered the outcome of the election. She testified that she respected Barr and “accepted what he was saying.”
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” Trump wrote on his social media website. “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!).”
Trump declared that Jan. 6 “represented the greatest movement in the history of our country.”