Former United States President Donald Trump ignored his top advisers, including his daughter, who recommended that he stop claiming that Democrats had stolen the 2020 election, the congressional committee investigating the 2021 Capitol assault revealed on Monday. .
“Even before the elections, Trump decided that, regardless of the facts and the truth, if he lost the elections, he would say that they were rigged,” says Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic congresswoman from this group who seeks to shed light on the responsibility of the Republican billionaire in the attack on the headquarters of the US Congress by his sympathizers on January 6, 2021.
The former president, 76, has reacted this Monday, calling the investigation a “mockery of justice”, in a 12-page letter in which he also reiterates his false allegations of fraud in the 2020 elections.
The Democratic-led panel “seeks to distract the American people,” he writes. “The truth is that Americans showed up in Washington en masse (…) on January 6, 2021 to hold their elected officials accountable for the clear signs of criminal activity throughout the election,” he adds, to despite the arsenal of evidence to the contrary.
In the second of a series of hearings after almost a year of investigation, the commission showed videos on Monday of the former president’s maneuvers between the night of the November presidential elections and the assault on Capitol Hill.
A few hours after the polls closed on November 3, 2020, Joe Biden and Donald Trump were tied. “It was increasingly clear that the election would not be decided that night,” said Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and, at the time, one of his closest advisers, in testimony released Monday by the commission.
However, shortly before 2:30 a.m. that day, Donald Trump made a televised statement from the White House. “We have won the elections,” he said, even though the vote count had not finished.
“It was too early to make this type of decision,” said Bill Stepien, former campaign manager of the Republican millionaire, before this group of congressmen.
One of the few who encouraged the president to speak out was his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who according to one of the president’s aides who testified before the commission, was “apparently drunk.”
On November 7, 2020, just before 11:30 a.m., Joe Biden was declared the winner. That same day, Donald Trump’s campaign manager attended a meeting with the outgoing president. “We told him what we thought were his chances of winning at that point … that there was maybe a 5 or 10% chance,” Bill Stepien said.
The president was getting more and more angry, Stepien recalled, and decided to change teams to surround himself with people who would support him in the crusade. On November 19, this new legal team gave a press conference. Sidney Powell, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, accused Venezuela, Cuba and the Democrats of having hatched an electoral plot.
Alongside her, Rudy Giuliani denounced “a scandalous iron curtain of censorship.”
Four days later, Attorney General Bill Barr went to the White House. The two examined several times the alleged electoral fraud presented by Donald Trump. “He demoralized me, because I said to myself: ‘He is crazy, if he really believes all this, it means that he is really disconnected from reality,'” Bill Barr, who resigned on 14 March, said in his statement. december.
The following month, Donald Trump and his aides continued to spread “these lies” about voter fraud to raise money, the commission said. His campaign inundated his supporters with dozens of emails and raised $250 million between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, he revealed.
“The big lie was also a big scam,” said Lofgren, known for working on the indictments before Congress of three presidents: Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.
The so-called “January 6” commission, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, will continue to present its findings on its year-long investigation, according to which the former White House tenant has planned “an attempted coup.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that he follows “all the hearings” of that commission and promised on Monday that he will hold accountable all those involved in the events of January 6, 2021, “regardless of their rank, position and regardless of whether or not they were” present at the assault on Congress.
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