House January 6 hearing committee unveils new testimony from top Trump officials

House January 6 hearing committee unveils new testimony from top Trump officials.

At a high-profile prime-time hearing on Thursday, the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol unveiled testimony from top Trump administration officials, with lawmakers arguing that former President Donald Trump was at the center of a “conspiracy” to overturn the election results in 2020.

The footage provided a sneak peek at the committee’s plans to release the findings of its months-long investigation throughout several upcoming hearings, drawing on the mountain of evidence gathered by congressional investigators from interviews with more than 1,000 witnesses, including some of Trump’s most potent allies.

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Former Attorney General William Barr told the committee at Thursday’s hearing that he warned Trump that his assertions that the election was stolen were “bullish**” and that he “didn’t want to be a part of it.”

“You can’t live in a society where the incumbent government survives in power based on its unfounded belief that there was electoral fraud,” Barr said in a recorded interview by committee Chairman Bennie Thompson.

Barr resigned as attorney general in late December 2020, soon after publicly stating that the Justice Department had found no proof of widespread fraud that may have influenced election outcomes, which enraged Trump.

A Trump campaign adviser, Jason Miller, remembered a post-election conversation in the Oval Office in which the campaign’s top data analyst warned Trump “in fairly direct words” that he would lose the election. Miller told investigators that the analyst’s conclusion was based on county-by-county and state-by-state data.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and a top White House staffer said she agreed with Barr’s assessment that voting fraud allegations were unfounded.

In her taped testimony, she remarked, “I respect Attorney General Barr. Therefore I accepted what he was stating.”

A Trump campaign lawyer, Alex Cannon, claimed he informed Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, that the team had found nothing in actual states that would influence the election’s outcome.

“So there’s no ‘there’ there,” Meadows said, according to him.

Despite this, Trump continued to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the Electoral College result, asking followers to “go down” to the US Capitol. At the same time, the Electoral College vote was being counted.

On January 6, Trump remarked, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a nation anymore.”

Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, said his boss was more faithful to the Constitution than Trump.