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Trump’s “Big Lie” Central to Second Jan. 6 Hearing

A former Trump campaign director and U.S. prosecutor who was weighed by the then president are among those who will testify on Monday as the Jan. 6 commission works to show how Trump is progressing with his plans to stay in power, despite his “Again and again it is said that he did not have [the] numbers to win. “

Tomorrow’s hearing focuses on the big lie: the former president’s decision to ignore the will of the electorate, declare victory in the election he lost, spread allegations of fraud and then decide to ignore court decisions when the decision, of course don’t go your own way, “a commission official told reporters.

Stephen will join the panel from Chris Sturworth, a former political editor of Fox News, who was a member of the network’s team that decided to call Arizona for current President Biden on election night in 2020.

BJ Pack, a former U.S. attorney in Georgia, will speak publicly for the first time since resigning because Trump was outraged by the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate his baseless allegations of voter fraud. They will be joined again by Conservative election lawyer Ben Ginsberg and Al Schmid, a Republican election official in Philadelphia who drew Trump’s anger after he declined to say the 2020 election was rigged.

Monday’s hearing, the second in a series scheduled after Thursday’s prime time, is an important building block in the commission’s plan to show that “Trump is leading an improved seven-part plan to repeal the presidential election,” as Vice President Liz Cheney said. R -Wyo.) Put it.

His first hearing of the day focused entirely on what Trump was told about his prospects for victory and his allegations of electoral fraud and how he opposed legal methods of questioning election results.

This moment is key to showing Trump’s guilt and will demonstrate that his actions – from pressure on the Justice Department to investigate, to strengthening his base over fears of election security, to the intervention of government and federal officials to help of his cause – were taken into account. his election claims were deceptive.

This is a point that will probably be of interest to the Ministry of Justice if they weigh in to bring charges against the former president.

“The former president did not have the numbers to win the election; he was told that he still chose to declare victory. The allegations of fraud accepted by the former president were baseless. He was told this over and over again, and he continued to repeat these allegations, “said the commission’s aide.

The Commission devoted much of its energy to this topic at its first hearing. They released video clips of testimony with another Trump campaign official, who said he was told “quite rudely that he will lose” shortly after the Trump election.

And twice he showed videos of former Attorney General Bill Barr, who expressed the same idea, saying he had “absolutely zero grounds for the accusations” and that Trump’s allegations were “complete nonsense.”

The commission even enlightened daughter Ivanka Trump, referring to Bar when she said, “I accepted what he said.”

The combination of witnesses shows that the commission wants to outline allegations of election fraud in the campaign, through conservative media and even through fundraising, as well as the impact it has had at the state level and in the judiciary. Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) is expected to play a higher role in examining the evidence.

The commission called on Stepien in November, noting his participation in the Stop Theft rallies organized on behalf of Trump, including promoting allegations of voting machine problems “despite an internal note in which campaign officials said such allegations were false.” .

He is also leading a campaign tasked with “asking states to postpone or refuse the certification of electoral votes and to send multiple electoral votes to the United States Congress,” the committee said in November.

Stepien told several media outlets that he would appear in court on summons. The commission’s aide declined to answer questions Sunday about how likely Stepien will be as a witness.

However, witnesses often appeared before commissions or their investigators on a “friendly summons” and Stepien did not file any lawsuits to challenge the commission’s request to testify.

Stepien is also an adviser to Harriet Hedgeman’s Trump-backed Cheney candidate in the GOP primary in Wyoming.

In the month after the 2020 election, he was again at the crossroads of Trump’s focus on both “finding” additional votes in Georgia and replacing the leadership of the Justice Department if they do not investigate his alleged fraud there.

“Pack’s office had investigated and debunked various allegations of election fraud in Georgia,” a Senate Judicial Commission review of Trump’s efforts at the Justice Department concluded last October.

This includes allegations by Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Guliani, that officials there hid with a suitcase of unsupervised ballots from Republicans watching the poll.

“In fact, the suitcase was a secure ballot box and the ballots were counted in the presence of observers from both parties,” the Senate committee said in a report.

But as Trump became increasingly focused on securing action in Georgia, he mentioned Pak, even after he was denied firing his own Justice Department leadership in favor of someone who would launch an investigation there.

“Atlanta, Atlanta, no surprise. They found nothing. “It’s not surprising because we never have Trump there as a US prosecutor,” Trump said.

He abruptly resigned again on January 5th, despite plans to stay until his inauguration.

Ginsberg, a longtime Republican election lawyer, has sounded the alarm about allegations of election fraud that Trump began making before election day.

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“The truth is that in all these years, Republicans have discovered only a few cases of fraud. Evidence of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness monster of the Republican Party. “People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist,” Ginsberg wrote in a post just days before the 2020 election, warning that the Republican Party was “being destroyed on Trump’s altar.”

“As he confronts the loss, Trump has dedicated his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. The lack of opportunity to formulate a convincing plan for a second term or to find an attack on Joe Biden that will persist, depriving enough voters of the right to become a key to his re-election strategy. Maybe that was the plan all along, “Ginsberg added.

Schmidt, a former Philadelphia city commissioner, also saw first-hand the impact of Trump’s allegations of election fraud. He received death threats after the election for his role in the city’s election commission, including comments that “bad actors” were “lying” about the vote-counting process.