Donald Trump created his theory of electoral fraud before the presidential elections, insisted on wielding it before the count was over and maintained it – and still maintains it – against all evidence and despite repeated attempts by the Prosecutor’s Office, by a large part of his advisers lawyers and his campaign team to drop what Attorney General Bill Barr called “crazy and bullshit.” This was the main conclusion of the second of the televised hearings of the committee investigating the “coup attempt” culminating in the storming of the Capitol at Trump’s instigation on January 6, 2021.
In recorded testimony unveiled at Monday’s hearing, prosecutor Barr told the House committee how he came to think the then-outgoing president had “lost touch with reality” with his false claim of vote-stealing in key states. like Georgia, Pennsylvania, or Arizona. It was “like in the Whack-a-Mole game”, he pointed out, alluding to how Trump brought out a new case of alleged tongo almost every day.
But it was not a mental derangement, as Barr himself specified. Because in reality Trump “never indicated an interest in knowing what the real facts were.” The former attorney general also recalled how, after declaring to the press that he did not believe there had been fraud, he believed that the president would fire him. “I was angrier than ever, and he said to me:” You said that because “you hate Trump”
The leader’s former campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who was unable to testify in person because his wife went into labor, appeared on screen explaining how he unsuccessfully tried to stop his boss from proclaiming his nonexistent victory and waiting for the counting of votes to end.
On the contrary, and as explained by the vice president of the committee, the Republican Liz Cheney, the defeated president chose to follow the advice of the “apparently drunk” legal adviser and former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, who encouraged him to declare himself the winner.
Cheney’s claim was supported by fellow former legal adviser to the president, Jason Miller, who testified via video that Giuliani had indeed suggested “claiming we won.” And he added: Giuliani, he was “definitely intoxicated.”
Also Ivanka Trump, daughter and at that time her father’s adviser, as well as her husband and also presidential adviser, Jared Kushner, thought on election night that it was too soon to declare a victory. “It was clear” that the recount would not end that night, Ivanka told the committee in recorded testimony. But the president insisted that anyone who disagreed with Giuliani was being “weak.”
Byung Pak, then a federal prosecutor in Georgia, explained that Attorney General Barr asked him to find out what he could about Giuliani’s claims of voter fraud in the state. And he pointed out that neither he nor later his successor, after he resigned due to the president’s attacks, found any evidence of fraud.
Similarly, the former Republican city commissioner who oversaw the 2020 Philadelphia election, Al Schmidt, flatly dismissed the Trump claim that thousands of votes from deceased people were counted there. “Not only was there no evidence of 8,000 dead voters in Pennsylvania but not even eight,” he settled. x
The evidence presented by the 6-E committee has opened the debate on whether the Attorney General’s Office should charge the former president with the criminal offenses that in fact the congressional investigators have already attributed to him by imputing “violations of the law and the Constitution” that would include sedition in an “attempted coup.”
Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner believes Attorney General Merrick Garland will have almost “no choice” but to bring charges against Trump. And he recalled a recent ruling by District Judge David Carter in which he considers it “very likely” that the former president committed a serious crime by pressuring his vice president, Mike Pence, to annul the elections on 6-E 2021.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff agreed that there is “credible evidence” that Trump committed “multiple federal crimes” and said it is up to Garland’s Justice Department to make a decision on whether they could be tried before a jury. Garland, for now, focuses his investigation on the perpetrators of the assault on Congress. And he remains in the dark as to what the ultimate goal of his performance is.
