Trump’s inner circle testifies his claims were bogus
by Mike Lillis, Rebecca Beitsch and Brett Samuels - 06/13/22 3:21 PM ET
The House committee examining last year’s attack on the Capitol accused former President Trump on Monday of lying purposely to the public in order to stay in power and raise money from sympathetic supporters — an orchestrated effort the panel said led directly to the deadly insurrection of Jan. 6.
Gathered on Capitol Hill for the second in a series of public hearings into its investigation, the select committee leaned heavily on the testimony of some of the leading figures in Trump’s political orbit to hammer home the notion that, not only were Trump’s claims of rampant voter fraud false, but also that he knew them to be so.
Leading the charge was former Attorney General Bill Barr, who delivered a damning portrait of the former president as someone increasingly “detached from reality” following the election.
Barr said his Justice Department was forced to play “whack-a-mole” with the flood of false fraud allegations pouring in from Trump supporters around the country. One by one, the department investigated the claims but found no wrongdoing. The accusation that Dominion Voting Systems, a voting machine company, had installed software to flip votes from Trump to Joe Biden was “idiotic,” Barr said, while another claim — that more people voted in Philadelphia than there are voters in the city — was “absolute rubbish.”
“And I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bull—-, I mean, that the claims of fraud were bull—-,” Barr told the committee in an earlier interview that was aired during Monday’s hearing. “And, you know, he was indignant about that.”
Testimony presented Monday showed a clear fracture behind the scenes between Trump and some of his top aides, who told the committee they confronted Trump directly about his claims of widespread fraud in the weeks after the 2020 election, only to be ignored.
“The election fraud claims were false. Mr. Trump’s closest advisors knew it. Mr. Trump knew it,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said at the outset of the hearing. “That didn’t stop him from pushing the false claims and urging his supporters to, ‘fight like hell’ to ‘take back their country.’”
The committee used video clips of Trump making fabulous claims of rampant fraud, and contrasted them with interviews with White House and campaign aides disputing those assertions.
They showed Trump laying the groundwork for his ultimate assertion — that only fraud could deal him an election loss — as early as April 2020, a thread he revisited when he claimed victory on election night, then amplified heading into Jan. 6.
Former deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue testified that he personally explained to Trump that DOJ officials had looked into claims of fraud in Georgia, Nevada and elsewhere, but that much of the information the president was receiving was inaccurate. In response, Trump would shift his focus to other claims of fraud.
“There were so many allegations that when you gave him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight you on it, he’d move to another one,” Donoghue said.
Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, who was promoted to that role in July 2020, was scheduled to testify in-person on Monday but backed out after his wife went into labor.
In his absence, the committee used clips of Stepien’s private deposition, in which he discussed his effort to convince Trump of the benefits of mail-in voting, of the amount of time it would take to count ballots and declare a winner in the 2020 election, and of the need to let votes be counted before declaring victory. As part of that effort, he brought in House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to help make the case. It fell on deaf ears.
“My recommendation was to say that votes are still being counted. It’s too early to tell, too early to call the race,” he said.
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https://thehill.com/news/house/3521715-trumps-inner-circle-testifies-his-claims-were-bogus/
