Donald Trump privately admitted to losing the 2020 election even as he worked to undermine and change the results, according to two top aides who testified before the January 6 committee.
During the ninth and possibly final hearing, the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection shared new testimony from Alyssa Farah, a former White House aide, who said that a week after the election was called in favor of Biden, Trump was watching Biden on the television in the Oval Office, and said: “‘Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?’”
In another new clip of testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, she shared that Trump told Meadows: “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out.”
The committee tried to build out the case that Trump tried to change the outcome of the election, despite knowing and believing that he had lost. Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the committee, also pointed to Trump’s actions in his final weeks in office, which carried with them a sense of reckless urgency.
“President Trump rushed to complete his unfinished business,” Kinzinger said, pointing to one example of an order calling for an immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Somalia. The order was signed on 11 November, which means troops would have to be pulled out rapidly, before Biden took office on 20 January.
The results would have been “catastrophic”, Gen Keith Kellogg, Trump’s acting national security adviser, testified. “It would have been a debacle.”
‘These are the highly consequential actions for a president who knows his term will shortly end,” Kinzinger said.
As the panel weighs whether to directly subpoena Trump, this is the strongest evidence they have presented so far that he was fully aware of his defeat, even as he falsely alleged election fraud.
