WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives Commission investigating the January 6 attack directly linked Donald J. Trump on Tuesday with a scheme to present fake lists of voters supporting Trump, and provided new details on how the former president tried to harass, deceive and bluff his way to undo his 2020 defeat in states across the country.
Using sworn personal testimony from Republicans and recorded testimony from other officials, the panel showed how the former president and a group of allies besieged state lawmakers and election officials after voting in a broad conspiracy to reverse the result. The campaign led to harassment and threats of violence against anyone who resisted.
Tuesday’s hearing is the most comprehensive picture so far of a president attacking democracy itself and repeatedly reaching its main mechanism – the administration of free and fair elections.
This was the committee’s fourth hearing, and it captured how long before a crowd of supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Mr. Trump used election lies to incite violence against anyone who dared to deny his false allegations. victory.
“The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer for the political body,” said spokesman Adam B. Schiff, the California Democrat who led the interrogation Tuesday. “If you can convince Americans that they can’t trust their own choices, that every time they lose, it’s somehow illegitimate, then what’s left but violence to determine who should govern?”
For nearly three hours, the commission demonstrated how Mr. Trump and his supporters – including his personal lawyer, Rudolf W. Giuliani, and his chief of staff, Mark Meadows – tried to persuade government officials to avoid verifying the vote count in order to cast their ballots. of Mr. Trump. victory in the Electoral College.
Mr Trump also tried to persuade lawmakers to create a list of alternative voters, hoping Vice President Mike Pence could use them to undermine the normal democratic process as he watched the official January 6th vote count. And the commission presented evidence linking Arizona Representative Andy Biggs and Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson to the plan.
The committee offered testimony from four government officials who opposed the former president, rejecting his increasingly desperate requests for help – often at great personal cost.
“I didn’t want to be used as a pawn,” said Rusty Bowers, a spokesman for the Arizona House of Representatives. Mr Bowers, a Republican, told the committee he had rejected Mr Trump’s attempts to get him to create pro-Trump voter lists in his state, explaining to the former president: “You are asking me to do something against my oath. and I will not break my oath. “
The topics of the hearings of the committee of the House of Representatives on January 6
However, such a challenge was worth it.
Mr Bowers told the committee that after fighting Mr Trump, a truck had been driven through his neighborhood, releasing a recording declaring him a pedophile. Mr. Bowers, who speaks of the Constitution with reverence and spiritual meaning, had tears in his eyes as he described his seriously ill daughter suffering some of the harassment outside their home. (She died last year.)
Similarly, Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Rafensperger testified that after he rejected Mr. Trump’s request on a phone call to find the votes that would lead him to the election, his wife of 40 received “sexual” threats through text messages and people broke into his daughter-in-law’s house.
“It turned my life upside down,” said Vandrea Moss, a Georgia election official involved in one of Mr Trump’s false accusations of fraudulent elections, in her own emotional testimony. Ms Moss, who is known as Shay, added: “It has affected my life in a fundamental way – in every way – all because of lies.”
And the commission contrasts with the four officials’ desire to speak with the refusal of many of Mr Trump’s allies and others around him to tell investigators what they know. In particular, Liz Cheney, a Republican from Wyoming and vice-chairman of the committee, said Pat Chipolon, an adviser to Mr Trump’s White House, has repeatedly repulsed his efforts to cancel the election.
“Our committee is confident that Donald Trump does not want Mr. Chipolon to testify here,” she said. “But we think the American people deserve to hear Mr Chipolone in person. He must appear before this committee, and we are working to secure his testimony. “
The plan to enlist the help of state lawmakers to create fake voter lists seems to have begun just days after the election, when pro-Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell sent an email suggesting the idea to John Eastman, another lawyer close to Mr. Trump.
“Movement is moving,” Ms. Mitchell wrote in an email presented as evidence at the hearing. “But there is a need for constitutional support.”
By November 18, 2020, according to the commission, another pro-Trump lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, had joined the effort by writing a note suggesting that Trump’s campaign should organize its allies in several different states. to draw up fake voter lists. Around Thanksgiving, others joined the plan, including Mr Giuliani and Mr Meadows, according to recorded testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, Mr Meadows’ aide.
Eventually, the Republican National Committee was also involved, said Rona McDaniel, the group’s chairman, in a recorded statement released at the hearing.
Ms. McDaniel testified that during a conversation with Mr. Trump, he called Mr. Eastman on the phone with her, “to talk about the importance of the RNC in helping the campaign bring together these conditional voters.”
All of this was allowed to continue, despite the fact that several Trump campaign lawyers thought it was illegal. The White House prosecutor’s office said this during a meeting with Mr. Meadows and Mr. Giuliani, according to Ms. Hutchinson.
And even those who imposed the scheme acknowledged that it was unfounded.
“We have a lot of theories,” said Mr Bowers, who told Mr Giuliani at a meeting with Arizona lawmakers. “We just don’t have the evidence.” In another case, when Mr. Bowers asked Mr. Eastman how there might be a legal way for him to simply name new voters, the lawyer had no answer, saying, “Just do it and let the courts decide.”
Even after Arizona certified its constituents, Mr Eastman and Mr Biggs called Mr Bowers, urging him to launch a new attempt to de-certify the vote following the fact.
Mr Rafensperger and Gabriel Sterling, two of Georgia’s top officials, told a similar story: pressure from Mr Trump to cancel the election, which ultimately led to threats and intimidation when they rejected him.
Mr Rafensperger spoke with Mr Trump on 3 January 2021, during which Mr Trump forced him to “find” enough votes to overturn the result and vaguely threatened him with a “criminal offense”. Mr. Stirling is perhaps best known for delivering a passionate speech on December 1, 2020, in which he addressed Mr. Trump directly, telling him that his election lies lead to violence against election workers. .
“Everything has gone too far – everything,” Mr Stirling said in a speech that was heard at the hearing. He added: “It must stop. Mr President, you have not condemned these actions or this language. “
Shortly after the election, Mr. Trump and his allies clung to conspiracy theories, falsely claiming that Atlanta election workers were videotaped silently taking thousands of ballots from a suitcase and passing them to counting machines. Although the allegations were quickly investigated and debunked, Mr Stirling said, Mr Trump and his lawyers continued to spread the allegations publicly and on social media.
Fighting this flow of misinformation, Mr Stirling said, is like “a shovel trying to empty the ocean”.
The committee showed the breathtaking scale of the pressure campaign in seven states, releasing videos of officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania flooded with thousands of text messages, phone calls protesting near their homes and threats. At one point, Brian Cutler, president of the Republican Chamber of Commerce in Pennsylvania, asked Mr. Trump’s legal team to stop his daily phone conversations with him because they were inappropriate.
However, the plan found impatient allies in Congress.
The committee showed texts sent by Mr Johnson’s aide to Mr Pence’s aide, stating that Mr Johnson wished to hand over a fake Wisconsin fake voter list to the Vice-President on 6 January. Mr. Pence’s assistant replied, “Don’t give him that.”
A spokesman for Mr Johnson on Tuesday blamed the exchange on his chief of staff, saying the senator “was not involved” in creating an alternative set of voters.
The hearing ended with testimony from Ms Moss, an election official who was processing votes with her mother, Ruby Freeman, in Atlanta on election day. In early December, Mr Giuliani appeared at a state legislative hearing in Georgia and falsely accused her and her mother of taking ballots from a suitcase and smuggling them through voting machines.
Mr Giuliani’s baseless allegations were reinforced by the right-wing media and by Mr Trump, who mentioned Ms Moss’s name several times during his conversation with Mr Rafensperger. After the allegations went viral, Ms Moss was subjected to racist threats over the phone and SMS and was afraid to leave the house.
She told the commission that her mother had fled her home after the FBI warned her she could be in danger. Ms Moss also recalled a panicked call from her seven-year-old grandmother, who said that people had arrived at her home seeking Ms Moss’s “civil arrest”.
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