The Jan. 6 committee has argued for months in the run-up to public hearings that at the center of its investigation is the Big Lie told by the 45th president: that he, and not his opponent Joe Biden, won the presidential election.
Donald Trump’s insistence that he won was tied to the baseless claim that widespread voter fraud in that year’s race for the White House was so prevalent it overturned his victory. This was not true. State auditors as well as members of Trump’s own administration, including his attorney general and members of the intelligence community, said as much publicly and, as we will see more of today, privately.
RELATED STORY: ‘He personally asked us to come to D.C.’ Insurrectionists explain why they were there on Jan. 6
Trump’s meritless claims of voter fraud anchored the scheme to pass off inauthentic slates of his electors to the National Archives and Congress. This gambit drove much of his campaign and legal team’s work as the nation careened from the election to the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.
Monday’s hearing will feature testimony from multiple witnesses spread over two panels. Initially, the committee expected testimony from Trump’s onetime campaign manager Bill Stepien. But in a shift to the schedule announced just over a half-hour before the proceedings got underway, the committee issued a statement announcing that Stepien could not testify due to a family emergency.
The committee also announced that it would delay the start of today’s hearing until 10:30 or 10:45AM ET. An attorney for Bill Stepien is expected to take his place for Monday. It is unclear if this means that Stepien will now testify another today. He is appearing under subpoena.
In addition to Stepien, the committee will hear testimony from Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt. Stirewalt has told the committee he was fired from the conservative network for calling the state of Arizona for now-President Joe Biden instead of Trump.
Stepien’s testimony was demanded under subpoena in November. As the lead supervisor of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, the committee said it wanted to question him about messaging he promoted laden with false claims about the election outcome. Those claims were made despite an internal awareness by campaign staff that the assertions were bogus, according to a memo made public last year.
The memo circulated inside the Trump campaign in November 2020 and was first uncovered in court filings. It showed Trump’s staff knew that the election fraud claims were bogus.
It reviewed voting machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic and found “no evidence” that the machines were corrupted. Trump’s legal team pumped a conspiracy theory at a Nov. 19 press conference arguing that George Soros was part of a ploy to steal the election from Trump and that Venezuela was in on the con, too. The New York Times reported on the internal memo at length last September.
Internal Memo Trump Team by Daily Kos on Scribd
Stepien’s testimony was expected to shed some light on Trump’s frame of mind as the push to overturn the election started picking up dangerously fast momentum. Investigators say Stepien was also present for several key meetings where Trump was informed that the actual data did not bear out the outcome he desired: It showed that he lost.
Campaign Action
The last panel of witnesses will include testimony from Al Schmidt, the former city commissioner for Philadelphia, election attorney Ben Ginsberg and Byung Pak, the former U.S. attorney for Georgia who stepped down during Trump’s push to overturn the results of the election.
A senior aide to the committee told Daily Kos on Sunday that they were unclear how amenable Stepien would be in his testimony to Trump. The onetime Trump campaign adviser is now consulting for Harriet Hagemen, a Republican candidate vying to replace Liz Cheney in the Senate. Cheney is the vice-chair of the committee, setting up a potentially interesting dynamic during questioning.
But the hearing is also expected to be led Monday in part by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat and member of the probe. After opening statements, viewers can also expect to see multimedia presentations and new evidence offered up for scrutiny.
The committee has compiled more than 140,000 pages of records and conducted more than 1,000 interviews. Monday’s hearing and the ones to come are expected to rely heavily on this wealth of records.
In addition to Stepien, the committee will hear testimony from former Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt. Stirewalt was terminated by Fox in January 2021 and has said that he believes he was fired because he was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden.
“When I defended the call for Biden in the Arizona election, I became a target of murderous rage from consumers who were furious at not having their views confirmed,” Stirewalt wrote in an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times just a week after Biden’s inauguration.
In the same op-ed, Stirewalt described the mob at the Capitol as a group of “enthusiastic ignoramuses.”
Fox News has denied that the political news editor was fired because of the Arizona call.
And later Monday, witness testimony from Byung Pak, the former U.S. attorney for Atlanta who resigned abruptly in January 2021, will be offered up.
In a closed-door session with the Senate Judiciary Committee last summer, Pak reportedly discussed the reasons for his resignation and said he was warned by Justice Department insiders that Trump wanted him fired after he investigated claims of election fraud in the state and turned up nothing.
RELATED STORY: A long hot summer with grand juries aplenty is in store for Donald Trump
Al Schmidt’s testimony should be critical as well. The former city commissioner for Philadelphia oversaw the presidential race there. He testified last year to the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration that election officials increasingly come under threat when disinformation about results also ticks up. He experienced it firsthand: He and his family were threatened as Trump continued to raise claims of fraud in his state.
Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election attorney with nearly 40 years of experience in the field will also testify Monday. He is expected to relay details about the lack of fraud he found in the 2020 election and will outline how election challenges traditionally unfold. Historically, Ginsberg has described Trump’s voter fraud conspiracy theory as baseless in an op-ed for The Washington Post.
“The president’s actions — urging his followers to commit an illegal act and seeking to undermine confidence in the credibility of election results — are doubly wrong. They impose an obligation on his campaign and the Republican Party to reevaluate their position in the more than 40 voting cases they’re involved in around the country,” Ginsberg wrote in September 2020.
Additional hearings are expected this week and will be held on June 15 at 10 AM ET. and June 16 at 1 PM ET. A time for the June 21st hearing has not yet been locked as of Monday. A final presentation is expected on June 23 at 8 PM ET.
RELATED STORY: The BIG Guide to who’s who in the Jan. 6 investigation
Listen and subscribe to Daily Kos Elections’ The Downballot podcast with David Nir and David Beard