4 takeaways from Day 2 of the Jan. 6 hearings.
Michael D.
Shear
June 13,
2022, 1:47 p.m. ETJune 13, 2022
June 13,
2022
Michael D.
Shear
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/13/us/trump-jan-6-hearing-monday.html
The one big
theme on the second day of hearings by the Jan. 6 committee was that former
President Trump was told repeatedly — including by his own attorney general —
that his “big lie” about a fraudulent election was baseless. But he made the
fake claim on election night anyway, and hasn’t stopped since.
As they did
during the opening hearing, committee members used video testimony from some of
Mr. Trump’s closest friends and advisers — including blunt comments from former
Attorney General William P. Barr — to show that the president must have known
that his claims were baseless.
Here are
some other takeaways from the second day of the hearings.
Trump was
described as ‘detached from reality’ after the election.
Mr. Barr’s
video testimony was some of the most compelling of the morning, with the former
attorney general describing Mr. Trump as increasingly “detached from reality”
in the days after the election. In his testimony, Mr. Barr said he told the
president repeatedly that his claims of fraud were unfounded, but that there
was “never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are.”
The
unvarnished portrait of Mr. Trump is a linchpin of the argument that the
committee is trying to make: that Mr. Trump knew his claims of a fraudulent
election were not true and made them anyway. Mr. Barr said that in the weeks
after the election, he repeatedly told Mr. Trump “how crazy some of these
allegations were.”
The
committee is making the case that Mr. Trump was a knowing liar. But Mr. Barr’s
testimony offered another possible explanation: that the president actually
came to believe the lies he was telling.
Two groups
surrounded Trump: ‘Team Normal’ vs. ‘Rudy’s Team.’
One thing
that came across clearly on Monday was that there were two different groups of
people around Mr. Trump in the days and weeks after the election.
Bill
Stepien, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, characterized his team as “Team Normal,”
as opposed to the team led by Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer.
Tom Hanks
Explains It All
A veteran
Republican operative, Mr. Stepien was among the campaign aides, lawyers, White
House advisers and others who urged Mr. Trump to abandon his unfounded claims
of fraud. Mr. Giuliani’s team was feeding the president’s paranoia and pushing
him to back unsubstantiated and fanciful claims of ballot harvesting, voting
machine tampering and more. “We call them kind of my team and Rudy’s team,” Mr.
Stepien told committee investigators in interviews. “I didn’t mind being
characterized as being part of Team Normal.”
Committee
members are hoping that the description of the two competing groups in Mr.
Trump’s orbit is evidence that Mr. Trump made a choice — to listen to the group
led by Mr. Giuliani instead of to those who ran his campaign and worked in his
administration. Mr. Trump chose, in the words of “Team Normal,” to listen to
those spouting “crazy” arguments instead.
A picture
emerges of election night at the White House.
Monday’s
hearing opened with a vivid portrait of election night at the White House,
describing the reaction from the president and those around him when Fox News
called Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. Using video testimony of the president’s
closest advisers and some members of his family, the committee showed how Mr.
Trump rejected the cautionary advice he received.
Mr. Stepien
said in the video that he had urged the president not to declare victory
prematurely, having already explained that Democratic votes were most likely to
be counted later in the night. Mr. Trump ignored him, Mr. Stepien and others
said. Instead, he listened to Rudy Giuliani, who aides said was drunk that
night, and was urging the president to claim victory and say the election was
being stolen.
Chris
Stirewalt, the Fox News political editor who was fired after his network’s
on-air call for Arizona, told the committee that the shift in returns that
night that prompted the president’s claims of voter manipulation were no more
than the expected results of Democratic votes being counted after Republican
ones. He expressed pride that his team was first to accurately call the Arizona
results and said there was “zero” chance that Mr. Trump would have won that
state.
Millions of
dollars were sent to a nonexistent ‘Election Defense Fund,’ the committee said.
It wasn’t
just the “big lie,” according to the Jan. 6 committee. It was also “the big
rip-off.”
In a video
presentation that concluded its second hearing, the committee described how Mr.
Trump and his campaign aides used baseless claims of election fraud to convince
the president’s supporters to send millions of dollars to something called the
“Election Defense Fund.” According to the committee, Mr. Trump’s supporters
donated $100 million in the first week after the election, apparently in the
hopes that their money would help the president fight to overturn the results.
But a
committee investigator said there was no evidence that such a fund ever
existed. Instead, millions of dollars flowed into a super PAC that the
president set up on Nov. 9, just days after the election. According to the
committee, that PAC sent $1 million to a charitable foundation run by Mark
Meadows, Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff, and another $1 million to a
political group run by several of his former staff members, including Stephen
Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda.
Representative
Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, summed up the discoveries this way:
“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump
campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and
what they would be used for.” She added, “So not only was there that big lie,
there was the big rip-off. Donors deserve to know where their funds are really
going. They deserve better than what President Trump and his team did.”
Correction:
June 13, 2022
An earlier
version of this article mischaracterized Chris Stirewalt’s role in Fox News
projecting Arizona for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 election. Mr. Stirewalt
was part of the team that made the decision, though he did not make the call
himself.
Michael D.
Shear is a veteran White House correspondent and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner
who was a member of team that won the Public Service Medal for Covid coverage
in 2020. He is the co-author of “Border Wars: Inside Trump's Assault on
Immigration.” @shearm
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário