Trump’s denial of advisers and his willingness to spread election lies

The executive summary of the House Jan. 6 committee’s report documents how former President Donald Trump was repeatedly warned by those closest to him – Cabinet members, campaign officials and even family members — that claims he had lost his reelection due to fraud were false. Trump continued to spread these lies.

“This was not him hearing this from Joe Biden’s spokesman on MSNBC,” David Becker, co-author of “The Big Truth,” a book about the damage of Trump’s election lies, said in an interview.

Trump’s lies about his loss The 2020 presidential election They were responsible for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and have contributed millions to the ex-president’s fundraising efforts. We have details to show that he was told truthfully about his loss but chose to lie about the matter.

PLANNING THE LIE BEFORE TIME

The Jan. 6, committee revealed that Trump has always planned to claim victory, no matter if he wins. His allies boasted about how they could fool the public to make it appear that he had won reelection. It cites correspondence from Tom Fitton of the conservative group Judicial Watch to the White House in October 2020 in which Fitton urges Trump to say after polls close: “We had an election. I won.”

The committee also obtained a recording of Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who told associates the week before the election that “what Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

Trump had spent months condemning mail voting, which rose in popularity during COVID-19. He also stated that voter fraud would be the only way he would lose an election. Trump declared victory in the early hours of the morning on the day following Election Day. He exploited an anomaly in vote counting wherein in-person votes that lean GOP were tallied first. This temporarily put him ahead. He demanded that all outstanding ballots be counted by local election officials, who leaned Democratic.

“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision,” the committee wrote in the executive summary for its report. “It was premeditated.”

LIES ABOUT VOTING MACHINES

Trump’s campaign realized he had lost by November 7, when the outstanding Democratic votes had been tallied, and most news agencies had called Joe Biden’s race for Joe.

“The group that went over there outlined, you know, my belief and chances for success at this point,” his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, testified before the committee. “And then we pegged that at, you know, 5, maybe 10 percent based on recounts.”

Stepien added that Trump believed him: “He was pretty realistic with our viewpoint, in agreement with our viewpoint of kind of the forecast and the uphill climb we thought he had.”

Trump insisted that he had won. His legal team left the case and was replaced by Rudolph Giuliani (ex-New York Mayor) and Sidney Powell (litigator), who began to make changes. wild fraud allegationsTo the dismay and concern of White House attorneys who warned Trump they were false.

The president seized control of a development that was taking place in a conservative, rural county in Michigan. There, voting machines had initially underestimated his victory margin. The cause was human error. After the paper ballots had been tallied, they were run through the machine again to verify that they were being counted correctly.

This is what Trump knew, according to the committee. Attorney General William Barr On December 1, 2020, Barr told the president that he had done so. Barr testified that Trump told him that the final paper ballot results were identical to the paper ballot. Yet the next day, Trump said in a speech: “In one Michigan county, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Barr and others from the administration kept telling Trump that there was nothing suspicious Dominion, which is a major vendor in voting machines, or Michigan. Barr and Jeffrey Rosen, the Deputy Attorney General, assured Trump that there were no problems. Even Robert O’Brien (Trump’s national security advisor) refuted a conspiracy theory that Dominion was connected to hostile foreign countries. However, the committee found that Dominion was connected to hostile foreign governments between November 2020 and January 6, 2021. Trump tweeted Dominion was mentioned almost three dozen times.

LIES ABOUT DEAD VOTERS, NUMBERS

Trump believed other conspiracy theories even though they were false. He claimed that Georgia had more than 5,000 deceased voters, a state where he lost more than 11,000 votes. Georgia Secretary-of-State Brad Raffensperger, who is a Republican, said that he had corrected him in a Jan. 2-phone call. He stated that local election officials had investigated the question and cross-referenced obituaries.

“The actual number were two,” Raffensperger told the president. “Two. Two dead people who voted. So that’s wrong.”

Four days later, during his speech at the Jan. 6 rally before his supporters stormed the Capitol, Trump declared: “Over 10,300 ballots in Georgia were cast by individuals whose names and dates of birth match Georgia residents who died in 2020 and prior to the election.”

Raffensperger also corrects other Trump claims regarding Georgia, such as that 18,325 voters registered at vacant addresses and 4,925 out-of-state voters cast ballots there. Trump reiterated them during his rally and in the lead-up to Jan. 6.

Trump released more negative numbers after being told that they were false.

“The President then continued, there are ‘more votes than voters,’” Richard Donoghue told the committee of a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation with Trump when Donoghue was the acting deputy attorney general. Donoghue claimed that he told Trump that he was comparing 2016 voter numbers with 2020 voting figures, which was incorrect because there were more registered voters during Trump’s reelection years. He warned against the use of a Pennsylvania number.

But on the ellipse on Jan. 6, Trump declared: “In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters.”

FALSE ATTACKS SUR ELECTION-WORKERS

Trump also made baseless claims election workers Despite warnings from their own law enforcement officers, they were still committing fraud. Rosen told the committee about a December 15 conversation in which Trump inquired about a video purporting that it showed Georgia election workers receiving ballots in a suitcase.

“We said, ‘It wasn’t a suitcase. It was a box. That’s what they use when counting ballots,’” Rosen recalled. “It’s benign.”

One week later, the report says, Trump declared: “There is even security camera footage from Georgia that shows officials telling poll watchers to leave the room before pulling suitcases of ballots out from under the tables and continuing to count for hours.”

Trump complained to Raffensperger about alleged misbehavior committed by election workers during the Jan. 2-call. Raffensperger warned Trump to delete the recording.

“I think that’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context,” the secretary of state told Trump.

Raffensperger offered to provide a link from a local TV station that disproved the lies. “I don’t need a link,” Trump replied.

The next day, he complained that Raffensperger was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under the table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters,’ dead voters and more. He has no clue!”