Panel suggests Trump knew he lost election
WASHINGTON — Shortly after the 2020 election, as ballots were still being counted, the top data expert in President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign told him bluntly that he was going to lose.
In the weeks that followed, as Trump continued to insist that he had won, a senior Justice Department official told him repeatedly that his claims of widespread voting fraud were meritless, ultimately warning him that they would “hurt the country.”
Those concerns were echoed by the top White House lawyer, who told the president that he would be entering into a “murdersuicide pact” if he continued to pursue extreme plans to try to invalidate the results of the 2020 election.
Yet Trump — time and again — discounted the facts, the data and many of his own advisers as he continued to promote the lie of a stolen election, according to hundreds of pages of exhibits, interview transcripts and email correspondence assembled by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack for a legal filing released late Wednesday.
In laying out the account, the panel revealed the basis of what its investigators believe could be a criminal case against Trump. At its core is the argument that, in repeatedly rejecting the truth that he had lost the 2020 election — including the assertions of his own campaign aides, White House lawyers, two successive attorneys general and federal investigators — Trump was not just being stubborn or ignorant about his defeat, he was knowingly perpetrating a fraud on the United States.
It is an audacious claim that could be difficult to back up in court, but in making it, the House committee has compiled an elaborate narrative of Trump’s extraordinary efforts to cling to power.
In it, Trump emerges as unable — or unwilling — to listen to his advisers even as they explain to him that he has lost the election, and his multiple and varied claims to the contrary are not grounded in fact.
‘What do I have to lose?’
At one point, Trump did not seem to care whether there was any evidence to support his claims of election fraud, and questioned why he should not push for even more extreme steps, such as replacing the acting attorney general, to challenge his loss.
“The president said something to the effect of: ‘What do I have to lose? If I do this, what do I have to lose?’ ” Richard Donoghue, a former top Justice Department official, told the committee in an interview. “And I said: ‘Mr. President, you have a great deal to lose. Is this really how you want your administration to end? You’re going hurt the country.’ ”
Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, also tried to get Trump to stop pursuing baseless claims of fraud. He pushed back against a plan from a rogue Justice Department lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to distribute official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election may have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified election results.
“That letter that this guy wants to send — that letter is a murdersuicide pact,” Cipollone told Trump, according to Donoghue. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.”
The account is part of a court filing in a civil case in California, in which the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against Trump.
They said they had evidence demonstrating that Trump, lawyer John Eastman and other allies could be charged with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the American people and common law fraud.
The committee’s filing shows how some of Trump’s aides and advisers repeatedly — and passionately — tried to get him to back down from his various false claims and plans to try to stay in power.
It started almost immediately after the polls closed in November 2020, when members of Trump’s campaign data team began trying to break through to the president to impress upon him that he had been defeated.
Claims proved false
During a conversation in the Oval Office, Trump’s lead campaign data guru “delivered to the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose,” Jason Miller, another top campaign aide, told the panel. Trump said he disagreed with the data expert’s analysis, Miller said, because he thought he could win in court.
Miller also told the committee that he agreed with Attorney General William Barr’s analysis that there had not been widespread fraud in the election and “said that to the president on multiple occasions,” the panel wrote in its filing.
In the chaotic post-election period, Trump’s legal team set up a hotline for fraud allegations and was flooded with unverified accounts from people across the country who claimed they had evidence. A U.S. Postal Service truck driver from Pennsylvania asserted without evidence that his 18wheeler had been filled with phony ballots. Republican voters in Arizona complained that some of their ballots had not been counted because they used Sharpie pens that could not be read by voting machines.
Trump appeared to be aware of many of these reports and would speak about them often with aides and officials, raising various theories about voting fraud even as they debunked them one by one.
“When you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight us on it,” Donoghue, the Justice Department official, told the committee. “But he would move to another allegation.”
Donoghue recalled, for instance, how he told Trump that Justice Department investigators had looked into, and ultimately discounted, a claim that election officials in Atlanta had wheeled a suitcase full of phony ballots into their counting room on Election Day.
Instead of accepting Donoghue’s account, Trump abruptly switched subjects and asked about “double voting” and “dead people” voting, then moved on to a completely different claim about how, he said, “Indians are getting paid” to vote on Native American reservations.
After Donoghue sought to knock down those complaints as well, he told the committee, Trump changed topics again and wondered aloud why his numerous legal challenges to the election had not worked.
Even though none of Trump’s persistent claims about election fraud turned out to be true, prosecutors will most likely have to grapple with the question of his state of mind at the time — specifically, the issue of whether he believed the claims were true, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School.