January 6 Committee: Former Trump campaign manager, conservative election lawyer, to testify on Monday

Photo of Liam adam Liam adam13/06/2022
12
Committee aides said on Sunday that the hearing would examine how former President Donald Trump embraced false allegations of fraud in the 2020 election and how he decided to declare victory in the hours after the election, even if he had been told that the numbers did not support him. out.

Aides said the hearing would show how Trump’s team pursued legal challenges in court and lost those cases, and then Trump chose to ignore the courts’ will and continued to try to overturn the election.

« We will reveal information about how the former president’s political apparatus is using these fraud lies about a stolen election to generate fundraising, raising hundreds of millions of dollars between Election Day 2020 and January 6,” aides added.

The hearing will also seek to connect Trump’s lies about the election to the violence at the US Capitol on January 6, aides said, including how rioters echoed the former president’s baseless allegations that which the election had been stolen.

Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, a select committee member, will play a « key role » in the presentation, but the hearing will technically be led by Speaker Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, according to panel aides.

In addition to live testimony, aides said the committee would continue to show more multimedia presentations and video recordings of closed-door depositions.

Other witnesses are expected to testify Monday, according to the Jan. 6 panel, including Chris Stirewalt, former political director at Fox; BJay Pak, the former United States Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia; Al Schmidt, a former Philadelphia City Commissioner; and conservative Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg.
Two sources familiar with the matter previously told CNN that Ginsberg is expected to testify that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, despite claims by Trump and his supporters. He will also talk about the unsuccessful court cases filed by Trump’s team.

Ginsberg is considered a leading Republican expert on voter fraud and played a key role in the Florida recount affair in 2000, when then-candidate George W. Bush defeated Vice-President George W. Bush. then-president Al Gore.

Even before the last presidential election, in a September 2020 essay, Ginsberg spoke out about the weakness of the former president’s allegation of widespread voter fraud and criticized the claims as lacking in evidence and « unsupportable. »

Stepien, Trump’s former campaign manager, is advising the campaign of Wyoming Republican Harriett Hageman, who has the former president’s endorsement in her main challenge to Rep. Liz Cheney. Cheney is vice-chairman of the January 6 committee. Stepien’s company received more than $190,000 from Hageman’s campaign this election cycle for strategy and fundraising consulting and video production, according to federal election documents.

Pak and Schmidt’s home states of Georgia and Pennsylvania, respectively, have been key states in the Trump campaign’s efforts to potentially overturn the 2020 election results.
Stirewalt was fired by Fox in January 2021 after a right-wing backlash to the Arizona network’s call for then-candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Stirewalt wrote in a Los Angeles Times article after his firing that the refusal of many Trump supporters to believe the election results was a « tragic consequence of the informational malnutrition that so gravely afflicts the nation. »

Monday morning’s hearing will focus on how Trump broadly questioned the election process, knowing that claims by his allies would not change the outcome, Cheney said last week.

The Jan. 6 committee will work to show how “Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information,” even though “Trump and his advisers knew he had, in fact, lost the election.” , Cheney said.

This story and title have been updated for additional developments.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins contributed to this report.


cnn en2fr2en

Photo of Liam adam Liam adam13/06/2022
12
Back to top button