The only major issue on the second day of the commission’s January 6 hearings was that former President Trump has been told many times – including by his own attorney general – that his “big lie” about fraudulent elections is unfounded. But he still made the false claim on election night and has not stopped since.
As they did during the inaugural hearing, committee members used video testimonies from some of Mr. Trump’s closest friends and advisers – including candid comments from former Attorney General William P. Barr – to show that the president should be he knew that his allegations were unfounded.
Here are some other conclusions from the second day of the hearings.
Trump was described as “detached from reality” after the election.
Mr Barr’s testimony was one of the most captivating in the morning, with the former chief prosecutor describing Mr Trump as increasingly detached from the reality of the post-election days. In his testimony, Mr Barr said he had repeatedly told the president that his allegations of fraud were unfounded, but that “there was never any indication of interest in the facts.”
The unpainted portrait of Mr Trump is the main point of the committee’s argument: that Mr Trump knew that his allegations of fraudulent elections were not true and yet he made them. Mr Barr said he had repeatedly told Mr Trump in the weeks after the election “how insane some of these allegations are”.
The Commission claims that Mr Trump was a deliberate liar. But Mr Barr’s testimony offered another possible explanation: that the president actually believed the lies he was telling.
“I thought, ‘Boy, if he really believes in these things, he, you know, has lost touch with, he’s cut off from reality, if he really believes in these things,’ Mr Barr told the committee.
Two groups bypassed Trump: Normal Team vs. Rudy’s Team.
One thing that became clear on Monday was that there were two different groups of people around Mr Trump in the days and weeks after the election.
Bill Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, described his team as a “normal team,” as opposed to the team led by Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.
A veteran Republican operative, Mr Stepien was among campaign aides, lawyers, White House advisers and others who called on Mr Trump to drop his baseless allegations of fraud. Mr Giuliani’s team fueled the president’s paranoia and pushed him to support the baseless and fantastic allegations of collecting ballots, manipulating the voting machine and more. “We call them something like my team and Rudy’s team,” Mr Stepien told commission investigators in interviews. “I didn’t mind being described as part of Team Normal.”
Committee members hope that the description of the two competing groups in Mr Trump’s orbit is proof that Mr Trump has made the choice to listen to the group led by Mr Giuliani instead of those who led the campaign. his and have worked in his administration. Mr Trump has chosen, in the words of the Normal Team, instead to listen to those who make “crazy” arguments.
A picture of election night in the White House appears.
Monday’s hearing began with a vivid portrait of election night at the White House, describing the reaction of the president and the people around him when Fox News called in Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Using video testimonies from the president’s closest advisers and some of his family, the commission showed how Mr. Trump rejected the warning advice he received.
Mr Stepien said in the video that he had called on the president not to declare victory prematurely, after explaining that Democrat votes were likely to be counted later that night. Mr Trump is ignoring it, Mr Stepien and others said. Instead, he listened to Rudy Giuliani, who his aides say was drunk tonight, and urged the president to declare victory and say the election had been stolen.
Chris Sturworth, the political editor of Fox News, who was fired after an on-air call to Arizona, told the committee that the change in returns tonight, which sparked the president’s allegations of voter manipulation, was no more than expected. democrats. counted after the Republican. He was proud that his team was the first to pinpoint Arizona’s results and said there was a “zero” chance of Mr Trump winning the state.
Millions of dollars have been sent to a non-existent Election Protection Fund, the commission said.
This was not just a “big lie”, according to the January 6 commission. It was also the “great theft.”
In a video presentation that concluded its second hearing, the commission described how Mr. Trump and his campaign aides used baseless allegations of election fraud to persuade the president’s supporters to send millions of dollars to something called the “Election Protection Fund.” “. According to the commission, Mr Trump’s supporters donated $ 100 million in the first week after the election, apparently in the hope that their money would help the president fight to repeal the results.
But a commission investigator said there was no evidence that such a fund had ever existed. Instead, millions of dollars poured into the super PAC, which the president created on November 9, just days after the election. According to the committee, the PAC sent $ 1 million to a charity run by Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, and another $ 1 million to a political group run by several of his former staff members, including Stephen Miller, an immigration architect. Mr Trump’s agenda.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, summed up the findings as follows: “During the commission’s investigation, we found evidence that the campaign of Trump and her deputies is misleading donors about where their money will go and what it will be used for,” she said. “So not only was there this big lie, there was the big theft. Donors deserve to know where their money really goes. They deserve better than what President Trump and his team did. “
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