Despite being told by the attorney general, his own campaign lawyers and many other senior advisers that his claims of election fraud were wrong, Donald Trump pressed ahead with the "big lie” that the election was stolen and undertook a fundraising enterprise based off of those claims that steered most of that money to Trump’s Save America PAC rather than to election-related litigation.
The Jan. 6 select committee made that argument on Monday and walked the public through a full roster of Trump employees and administration officials who flatly told him he lost the election. When Trump did not like what he heard from those employees, he turned to Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, among others who were proposing disproven election fraud claims described by former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann as “nuts.”
“What they were proposing, I thought was nuts and in theory was also completely nuts,” Herschmann said in a video recorded interview presented at the hearing.
Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was initially set to testify in person, but backed out due to the birth of his child. Rather, the committee played video of Stepien’s deposition, in which he distinguished he was part of “team normal” compared to those, like Giuliani, who perpetuated election fraud claims.
Stepien and Jason Miller, a senior adviser for the Trump campaign, believed Trump should not declare victory on election night, Nov. 4, 2020. Stepien said he told Trump “it’s too early to call the race,...
Government agents were confronted by protesters outside the Philippine Senate when they tried to arrest former president Rodrigo Duterte's chief drug war enforcer, but visuals shared online do not ...