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Introductory Material to the Final Report of the Select Committee
[ pg 7 ]
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: OVERVIEW OF THE EVIDENCE DEVELOPED
[Emphasis added]
[ pg 8 ]
President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated. The Committee has assembled a range of evidence of Trump’s preplanning for a false declaration of victory. This includes multiple written communications on October 31 and November 3, 2020, to the White House by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.[42] This evidence demonstrates that Fitton was in direct contact with Trump and understood that Trump would falsely declare victory on election night and call for vote counting to stop. [...]
[ pg 10 ]
In the weeks that followed the election, President Trump’s campaign experts and his senior Justice Department officials were informing him and others in the White House that there was no genuine evidence of fraud sufficient to change the results of the election. For example, former Attorney General Bill Barr testified:
And I repeatedly told the President in no uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud, you know, that would have affected the outcome of the election. And, frankly, a year and a half later, I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on that.[53]
Former Trump Campaign lawyer Alex Cannon, who was asked to oversee incoming information about voter fraud and set up a voter fraud tip line, told the Select Committee about a pertinent call with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in November 2020:
Cannon: So I remember a call with Mr. Meadows where Mr. Meadows was asking me what I was finding and if I was finding anything. And I remember sharing with him that we weren’t finding anything that would be sufficient to change the results in any of the key States.
Committee Staff: When was that conversation?
Cannon: Probably in November. Mid- to late November....
Committee Staff: And what was Mr. Meadows’s reaction to that information?
Cannon: I believe the words he used were: “So there is no there there?”[54]
[ pg 11 ]
Trump Campaign Senior Advisor Jason Miller told the Committee that he informed President Trump “several” times that “specific to election day fraud and irregularities, there were not enough to overturn the election.”[56]
[...]
The General Counsel of President Trump’s campaign, Matthew Morgan, informed members of the White House staff, and likely many others, of the campaign’s conclusion that none of the allegation of fraud and irregularities could be sufficient to change the outcome of the election:
[ pg 12 ]
Barr then told the Associated Press on December 1st that the Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”[61] Next, he reiterated this point in private meetings with the President both that afternoon and on December 14th, as well as in his final press conference as Attorney General later that month.[62] The Department of Homeland Security had reached a similar determination 2 weeks earlier: “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”[63]
In addition, multiple other high ranking Justice Department personnel appointed by President Trump also informed him repeatedly that the allegations were false. [...]
[ pg 16 ]
By mid-December 2020, Donald Trump had come to what most of his staff believed was the end of the line. The Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit he supported filed by the State of Texas in the Supreme Court, and Donald Trump had this exchange, according to Special Assistant to the President Cassidy Hutchinson:
The President was fired up about the Supreme Court decision. And so I was standing next to [Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows, but I had stepped back... The President [was] just raging about the decision and how it’s wrong, and why didn’t we make more calls, and just this typical anger outburst at this decision... And the President said I think — so he had said something to the effect of, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”[99]
[ pg 17-18 ]
Despite all that Donald Trump was being told, he continued to purposely and maliciously make false claims. To understand the very stark differences between what he was being told and what he said publicly and in fundraising solicitations, the Committee has assembled the following examples.
Then-Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen (12/15/20): “And so he said, ‘Well, what about this? I saw it on the videotape, somebody delivering a suitcase of ballots.’ And we said, ‘It wasn’t a suitcase. It was a bin. That’s what they use when they’re counting ballots. It’s benign.’”[105]
President Trump one week later (12/22/20): “There is even security camera footage from Georgia that shows officials telling poll watchers to leave the room before pulling suitcases of ballots out from under the tables and continuing to count for hours.”[106]
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Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue (12/27 & 12/31/20): “I told the President myself that several times, in several conversations, that these allegations about ballots being smuggled in in a suitcase and run through the machine several times, it was not true, that we looked at it, we looked at the video, we interviewed the witnesses, that it was not true.... I believe it was in the phone call on December 27th. It was also in a meeting in the Oval Office on December 31st.”[107]
President Trump later that week (1/2/21): “[S]he stuffed the machine. She stuffed the ballot. Each ballot went three times, they were showing: Here’s ballot number one. Here it is a second time, third time, next ballot.”[108]
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GA Sec. State Brad Raffensperger (1/2/21): “You’re talking about the State Farm video. And I think it’s extremely unfortunate that Rudy Giuliani or his people, they sliced and diced that video and took it out of context.” ... “[W]e did an audit of that and we proved conclusively that they were not scanned three times.... Yes, Mr. President, we’ll send you the link from WSB”
[Trump]: “I don’t care about a link. I don’t need it.”[109]
President Trump one day later (1/3/21): “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”[110]
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Attorney General Bill Barr (12/1/20): “Then he raised the ‘big vote dump,’ as he called it, in Detroit. And, you know, he said, people saw boxes coming into the counting station at all hours of the morning and so forth.... I said, ‘Mr. President, there are 630 precincts in Detroit, and unlike elsewhere in the State, they centralize the counting process, so they’re not counted in each precinct, they’re moved to counting stations, and so the normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours.’
And I said, ‘Did anyone point out to you -- did all the people complaining about it point out to you, you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time? I mean, there’s no indication of fraud in Detroit.’”[111]
President Trump one day later (12/2/20): “I’ll tell you what’s wrong, voter fraud. Here’s an example. This is Michigan. At 6:31 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly. We were winning by a lot. That batch was received in horror.... In Detroit everybody saw the tremendous conflict... there were more votes than there were voters.”[112]
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Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue (12/27/20): “The President then continued, there are ‘more votes than voters...’. But I was aware of that allegation, and I said, you know, that was just a matter of them ‘comparing the 2020 votes cast to 2016 registration numbers.’ That is ‘not a valid complaint.’”[113]
President Trump ten days later (1/6/21): “More votes than they had voters. And many other States also.”[114]
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Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue (1/3/21): “[W]e would say to him, you know, ‘We checked that out, and there’s nothing to it.... And we would cite to certain allegations. And so – like such as Pennsylvania, right. ‘No, there were not 250,000 more votes reported than were actually cast. That’s not true.’ So we would say things like that.”[115]
President Trump three days later (1/6/21): “In Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters. And the number is actually much greater than that now. That was as of a week ago. And this is a mathematical impossibility unless you want to say it’s a total fraud.”[116]
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[...]
This table of evidence continues for several more pages, documenting the many, many times Trump was informed that there was ‘no there there’ — yet Trump choose to intentional lie about these made up accusations anyways, despite having absolutely no evidence to back up his lies. His own administration officials told him as much.
You know what you call someone who intentionally lies to the people, again and again, to incite them to commit violence acts, despite have overwhelming evidence to the contrary ?
Guilty!
If there were any Justice left in the world. Hopefully early in the new year, we will finally see such Justice done.
Trump aimed his armed mob at the Capitol, to halt the peaceful transfer of power — despite having all the evidence in the world, that he had Lost, fair and square. Hell, the instigator-in-chief had admitted as much, when the chips were down, and the SCOTUS called his bluff …
Yet he continued to Lie anyways, intentionally, willfully, and ILLEGALLY.
Or as the 1-6 Select Committee succinctly puts it:
President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated.
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You can find additional damning evidence here, in the pdf of the 1-6 Committee’s Executive Summary (via LawFare — thank you.)
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