A former Trump campaign director and a U.S. attorney the then-president weighed firing are among those who will testify Monday as the Jan. 6 committee works to show how Trump forged ahead with plans to remain in power despite being “told again and again that he didn’t have [the] numbers to win.”
“Tomorrow’s hearing is focused on the big lie: the decision by the former president to ignore the will of the voters, declare victory in an election he lost, spread claims of fraud and then decide to ignore the rulings of courts when the judgment of course didn’t go his way,” a committee aide said on a call with reporters.
Stepien will be joined on a panel by Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who was a member of the team at the network that made the decision to call Arizona for now-President Biden on election night 2020.
BJay Pak, once a U.S. Attorney in Georgia, will speak publicly for the first time since resigning as Trump fumed over the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate his baseless allegations of voter fraud. Pak will be joined by conservative election attorney Ben Ginsberg and Al Schmidt, a Republican election official in Philadelphia who drew Trump’s ire after he refused to say the 2020 election was rigged.
Monday’s hearing, the second in a series planned after Thursday’s prime time kickoff, is an important building block in the committee’s plan to show that “Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election,” as Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) put it.
Its first daytime hearing is entirely dedicated to laying out what Trump was told about his prospects for victory and his election fraud claims and how he bucked the lawful methods for questioning election results.
That point is key to showing Trump’s culpability, and would demonstrate that his actions — from pressuring the Department of Justice to investigate, to energizing his base over concerns of election security, to roping in state and federal officials to aide his cause — were taken knowing his election claims were fraudulent.
It’s a point that would also likely be of interest to the Department of Justice, should they weigh bringing charges against the former president.
“The former President didn’t have the numbers to win the election; he was told, he chose to declare victory anyway. The claims of fraud the former president embraced were baseless. He was told that again and again, and he continued to repeat those claims anyway,” the committee aide said.
The committee dedicated much of its energy to this topic in its first hearing. They played clips of video footage from depositions with another Trump campaign staffer saying shortly after the election Trump had been told “in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”
And it twice showed clips from former Attorney General Bill Barr making that same point, saying there was ”absolutely zero basis for the allegations” and that Trump’s claims were “complete nonsense.”