WASHINGTON, DC — The congressional hearings into the
US Capitol assault were set to
focus Monday on Donald Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was
stolen, which fueled the anger investigators say led to the deadly
insurrection.
اضافة اعلان
Trump started
pushing what came to be known as his “Big Lie” around 2:30am on November 4,
2020, making baseless allegations of fraud and prematurely declaring victory in
an election he ultimately lost to Joe Biden by 7 million votes.
The committee says
it will show how that initial claim grew quickly into a conspiracy to cling to
power by Trump and his inner circle, even though they knew he’d lost.
The defeated former
president, his fundraising organization and the Republican National Committee
raised a fortune pushing bogus election fraud claims, investigators say.
“We will hear from
witnesses ... who will talk about the fact that the former president didn’t
have the numbers to win, that he was told again and again that he didn’t have
the numbers to win,” a committee aide said.
“We will reveal
information about how the former president’s political apparatus used these
lies about fraud about a stolen election to drive fundraising, bringing hundreds
of millions of dollars between election day 2020 and January 6,” 2021, the aide
added.
The committee
suffered a setback, however, when its star witness, Trump 2020 campaign manager
Bill Stepien, canceled his appearance due to a “family emergency” — his wife
reportedly went into labor.
False claims
Stepien, who was believed to be appearing under subpoena, helped formulate
the strategy to challenge the election results, but he cut his ties to the
Trump campaign in December 2020.
He supervised the “Stop
the Steal” effort, the committee says, promoting “certain false claims related
to voting machines despite an internal campaign memo in which campaign staff
determined such claims were false.”
Other witnesses who
are still due to appear include Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political
editor who was part of the team that called
Arizona for Biden before the
network’s competitors, infuriating Trump and his inner circle.
Some Trump aides
reportedly complained directly to the network’s leadership and Stirewalt was
fired by what Fox News called a structural re-organization in January 2021.
Ben Ginsberg, a top
Republican election lawyer, will also appear alongside BJay Pak, the former top
federal prosecutor in Georgia.
Pak was pressured
by Trump to investigate false claims of election fraud and resigned in January
2021 after learning the then-president planned to fire him.
“The evidence is
very powerful that Donald Trump began telling this big lie even before the
election, that he was saying that any ballots counted after election day were
going to inherently suspect,” Congressman Adam Schiff, a member of the panel,
told ABC on Sunday.
“That lie continued
after the election and ultimately led to this mob assembling and attacking the
Capitol.”
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