- Trump tried to discredit his daughter Ivanka for not "studying" or "looking at" election results.
- But the
January 6 hearings are revealing Trump's willingness to cling to false election theories.
Former President Donald Trump last week accused his daughter,
But the committee's second hearing on Monday highlighted how the former president eagerly latched onto each and every false election conspiracy theory — and revealed how he forged ahead with progressively outlandish claims in defiance of his closest advisers.
The clips of witness testimony featured in the hearing are also significant as Trump is seeking to shape the Republican party in his image in the 2022 midterms and lay the groundwork for a 2024 presidential campaign — in which he'll ask Americans to vote for him in a system he's spent over two years trashing as rigged from top-to-bottom.
The committee's first public hearing, on June 9, featured deposition clips from key witnesses close to Trump, including his eldest daughter and former senior advisor, who simply but powerfully rebuked her father in saying that she "accepted" former Attorney General Bill Barr's public statements that the 2020 election wasn't rigged by massive fraud.
"Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results," Trump posted on Truth Social after the first hearing, seeking to discredit his daughter. "She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!)."
The panel's second hearing on Monday zeroed in more extensively on Trump's election lies, the fantastical nature of the conspiracy theories he spread, and how his campaign leveraged those lies to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who believed their money was helping overturn a stolen election.
The January 6 hearings again reiterate Trump's lack of understanding of how elections work and his affinity for baseless theories, both of which were on full display throughout the 2020 election cycle as Trump raised outlandish conspiracies in tweets and in spoken remarks.
In video clips featured by the committee from those chaotic weeks after the election, Trump famously declared that "frankly, we did win this election" in the early hours of November 4 on election night. He stoked doubt in the election over "late-night ballot dumps" created, in part, by Republican-controlled state legislatures not allowing election officials to get a head-start on processing ballots.
He also, incomprehensibly, claimed that nefarious forces were turning "dials" and pressing buttons on voting machines to "flip" votes from him to President Joe Biden — despite the fact that every voter in a key swing state and over 90% of voters nationwide cast their votes on verifiable, auditable paper ballots.
Trump twisting tall tales about the integrity of the election wasn't new. But some of the most revealing clips out of the second hearing came from depositions with those closest to Trump, including Ivanka, Barr, his former campaign manager Bill Stepien, and senior adviser Jason Miller, who knew the election wasn't rigged and privately pushed back on Trump.
"I was saying that we should not go declare victory until we had a better sense of the numbers," Miller recalled in a deposition.
"It was far too early to be making any calls like that," said Stepien of Trump's November 4 victory declaration. "Ballots were still being counted. Ballots were still going to be counted for days. And it was far too early to be making any proclamation like that."
Stepien, an experienced campaign professional, described his view of the numbers as "bleak." He himself "checked out" as Trump doubled down on his false election fraud claims, describing the two developing camps as "Team Giuliani", referring to Rudy Giuliani, and "Team Normal."
In the end, "Team Normal" lost out — a key stepping stone in the chain of events that led to the Capitol riot.
"I didn't think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional," Stepien said. "So that led to me stepping away."
Barr detailed in his testimony how he walked Trump through how paper ballots are scanned and verified, how the central counting of ballots led to large batches of results getting reported overnight, and how, in his view, the claims about Dominion voting machines flipping votes were "idiotic" — a process he likened to a game of "Whac-a-Mole."
"I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit and I didn't want to be a part of it," Barr testified. "And that's one of the reasons that went into me deciding to leave when I did."