WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump planned “well in advance” to declare victory on election night, regardless of the vote count, said Rep. Zoe Lofgren at Thursday’s hearing by the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“This big lie, President Trump’s effort to convince Americans that he had won the 2020 election, began before the election results even came in. It was premeditated. It was not based on … results or any fraud, if there was any actual problems with voting. It was a plan concocted in advance to convince his supporters that he won, and the people who seemingly knew about the plan in advance would ultimately play a significant role in the events of January,” Lofgren, D-Calif., said.
Each of the nine committee members are expected to lead a portion of the sweeping hearing, which could be the hearing’s last by presenting fresh testimony from new and old witnesses, as well as new evidence obtained from the Secret Service and never-before-seen video footage of the riot and of key players in the days around Jan. 6.
“What did President Trump know? What was he told? What was his personal and substantial role in the multi-part plan to overturn the election?” Committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said at the hearing.
Committee leaders described the hearing’s goal as a step back to look at the entire plan to keep Trump in power, and said it will cover the span of time from before the 2020 election until after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Previous hearings each focused on an aspect of Trump’s attempts to overturn the election. Committee members will provide new information relevant to the topics of each of the previous hearings, and will also touch on ongoing threats to democracy, but the main focus will be on Trump’s state of mind and role in the event.
“The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man, Donald Trump, who many others followed,” vice chairwoman Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said. “None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it. Exactly how did one man cause all of this? Today we will focus on President Trump’s state of mind, his intent, his motivations and how he spurred others to do his bidding.”
Cheney asked the public to keep three facts in mind: that Trump always planned to claim fraud if he lost; that he knew his claims of fraud were false and made a conscious decision to make them anyway; and that the people who ultimately stopped his attempts to stay in power were Republicans.
Thursday is the committee’s first public hearing in nearly three months. In the interim, public attention has been seized by news of the Justice Department’s accelerating investigation into the insurrection and the scheme to use false electors to cast doubt on the election results and keep Trump in office, and on the FBI’s efforts to recover classified materials that were improperly — and possibly illegally — stored at Trump’s Florida estate after he left office.
Lofgren told CNN on Tuesday that the hearing would touch on the “close ties between people in Trump world and some of these extremist groups” and present other new information the committee has gathered since its last public proceedings in late July.
“I do think that it will be worth watching,” Lofgren said in the interview. “There’s some new material that, you know, I found as we got into it, pretty surprising.”
No witnesses are scheduled to appear live at the hearing, but the committee showed new clips from the more than 1,000 depositions it has collected along with footage captured by Danish filmmakers who followed conservative provocateur Roger Stone, a longtime Trump confidant with ties to the Proud Boys, for two years filming a documentary.
In one clip, Stone said before the election, “F--- the voting. Let’s get straight to the violence.” The committee also played footage of another adviser, Steve Bannon, saying before the election that Trump would claim victory regardless of the results.
“(Trump’s) going to declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner. ... He’s going to sit right there and say they stole it,” Bannon said. “If Biden is winning [on election day], Trump is going to do some crazy s---.”
The committee also showed new documents it obtained from the National Archives and the Secret Service. According to the records, Trump consulted with one of his outside advisers, conservative activist Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, about the strategy for election night a few days prior. In a draft statement proposed on Oct. 31, Fitton encouraged Trump to say, “We had an election today — and I won,” and to demand that all votes not counted on Election Day be rejected.
The hearing also pulled from hundreds of thousands of records received from the Secret Service showing that Trump was told about the potential for violence on Jan. 6, 2021, but rallied his supporters to go to the Capitol anyway. They also detail the former president’s repeated orders to his Secret Service detail to let him join supporters marching on Capitol Hill.
Committee members have indicated that, barring additional information coming to light, this is likely the panel’s last hearing. But committee aides balked at reporters’ attempts to label it their closing argument, adding that more evidence or testimony could surface before the committee presents its final report by the end of the calendar year.
Cheney said the committee is still weighing whether to make a recommendation about criminal charges to the Justice Department.
Republicans are not expected to renew the committee if they regain control of the House in 2023.
