By Todd Lassa
UPDATE -- The U.S. House Select Committee Investigation of the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol has postponed Wednesday's public hearing without giving a reason, NPR reports. The panel will reconvene as scheduled at 10 a.m. Thursday.
The lesson from Day Two of the House Select Committee’s public hearings of its investigation of the January 6 Capitol insurrection is that if you can convince enough followers about something like the Big Lie, you can make money off it. Or as committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) put it; “Not only was there the Big Lie, there was the big ripoff.”
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the panel’s vice-chair, quoted “one conservative editorial board” as writing, “Mr. Trump betrayed his supporters on January 6 and he is still doing it.”
In his live testimony, Chris Stirewalt, former politics editor for Fox News described how an exclusive formula for calling each state’s election results gave his cable network an edge in calling Arizona for Biden ahead of other networks – which led to his being fired for it.
Bill Stepien, Trump’s chief political advisor for the 2020 election, was excused from live testimony because his pregnant wife was in labor Monday morning. As part of a large inner-circle of the 45th president who tried to tell him there was no credible evidence of results-changing voter fraud, Stepien described in videotaped testimony how “there was a surprise in the call” for Arizona by Fox News by “most everybody” in the room watching the returns from the White House that night.
Stepien tried to get Donald J. Trump and the rest of the group to agree not to call the election for either candidate that Tuesday night, as results would be counted for days. But Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, arrived at the White House later election night, “apparently inebriated,” and tried to talk the president and his advisors to reject that idea as “being weak.”
Stepien’s group became known as “Team Normal” while Giuliani and his circle were known as “Team Crazy,” according to Lofgren. (Much of Team Crazy’s early tactics focused on falsely accusing Dominion Voting Systems of fraud.)
The next day, Trump told a group of supporters in a nationally televised meeting “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
“Mr. Stepien, after the votes were counted, who won the election?” Lofgren asked in a video clip.
“Uh, Joseph Robinet Biden Jr., of the great state of Delaware.”
Asked by Lofgren to explain “Red Mirage,” ex-Fox News’ Stirewalt said it is the foundation of the Big Lie in that it is predicated on statistics that show Democrats use mail-in and absentee ballots far more than Republicans, and those ballots are only counted after election-day ballots.
“You expect to see Republicans with a lead (early on) but it’s not really a lead,” Stirewalt explained. “When you put a jigsaw puzzle together you see the same image – it doesn’t matter which pieces you put together first.”
The panel relied heavily once again on former Attorney General William Barr. (It doesn’t hurt he was seen as a fierce Trump loyalist after his “handling” of the Mueller Report.)
“Right out of the box on election night Trump claimed that there was major fraud,” he said, and it “seemed to be based” on a lot of Democratic votes coming in late, particularly from big cities in the states that mattered.
Lofgren launched into more video, including recordings of former Trump attorney Sidney Powell, and of Giuliani on Fox News describing hundreds of thousands of ballots in garbage trucks being dumped into vote counts.
Barr said of Trump; “He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff. (There) wasn’t any interest in what the actual facts were.” Challenging states’ results was not the pervue of the Justice Department, Barr noted, but rather up to his campaign’s attorneys. And the 1/6 panel reiterated the results of 62 such cases the Trump campaign brought in nine states plus the District of Columbia, with 22 Republican-appointed judges, 10 by Trump, plus all three of his Supreme Court nominees, who rejected fraud claims. Of those, Trump scored 61 losses and one win.
And yet, Trump established the Official Election Defense Fund, which the 1/6 panel, questioning numerous ex-Trump officials and advisors concludes does not exist, according to Lofgren, though it has raised $250 million, nearly $100 million of it in the first week after the election. Trump’s Save America PAC created November 9, 2020, has paid $1 million of its donations to Mark Meadows’ Conservative Partnership Institute, $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection and $5 million to Event Strategies Inc. according to the 1/6 panel.
(TUE 6/14/22)