The House Jan. 6 committee aired videotaped testimony Monday from a parade of insiders in Donald Trump’s White House describing how they each told Trump in the wake of his 2020 loss that there was no credible evidence the election had been stolen. But they said they were ignored, ridiculed and sidelined by the former president as he persisted in making baseless claims that laid the groundwork for the violent attack on the Capitol two months later.
Monday’s hearing of the select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection focused on Trump’s efforts to spin a narrative of massive voter fraud that had no basis in reality and, in fact, cut directly against the counsel he was getting from some of his most senior advisers.
They included former campaign manager Bill Stepien, who has not spoken publicly about the Trump campaign before or after the February deposition, portions of which were shown Monday. In the clips, Stepien described advising Trump and his deputies both before and after the election about his narrow path to victory — concluding by mid-November that Trump’s chances were “very, very, very bleak.”
Stepien identified himself as part of a subset of clear-eyed Trump advisers — “Team Normal,” he called it — that was eventually sidelined in favor of a rival group led by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and other loyalists who were indulgent of groundless voter-fraud allegations and conspiracy theories.
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