The executive summary of the House Jan. 6 committee’s report documents how former President Donald Trump was repeatedly warned by those closest to him – Cabinet members, campaign officials and even family members — that claims he had lost his reelection due to fraud were false. But Trump spread those lies anyway.
“This was not him hearing this from Joe Biden’s spokesman on MSNBC,” David Becker, co-author of “The Big Truth,” a book about the damage of Trump’s election lies, said in an interview.
Trump’s lies about his loss in the 2020 presidential election sparked the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and have helped fuel millions of dollars in donations to the former president. Here are details showing he was told the truth about his loss and chose instead to lie about it.
PLANNING THE LIE AHEAD OF TIME
The Jan. 6 committee has made clear that Trump long planned to claim victory, whether he actually won or not. His allies were boasting of how they could try to fool the public to make it seem that he had won reelection. It cites correspondence from Tom Fitton of the conservative group Judicial Watch to the White House in October 2020 in which Fitton urges Trump to say after polls close: “We had an election. I won.”
The committee also obtained a recording of Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who told associates the week before the election that “what Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Trump had spent months demonizing mail voting, which swelled in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The then-president also insisted the only way he would lose the election would be by massive voter fraud. When Trump did declare victory early in the morning the day after Election Day, he exploited a quirk in vote counting in which in-person votes that leaned GOP were tallied first, putting him temporarily ahead. He demanded that local election officials stop counting outstanding ballots, which leaned Democratic.
“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,” the committee wrote in the executive summary for its report. “It was premeditated.”
LIES ABOUT VOTING MACHINES
By Nov. 7, when those outstanding Democratic votes had been tallied and most news organizations had called the race for Joe Biden, Trump’s own campaign knew he had lost.
“The group that went over there outlined, you know, my belief and chances for success at this point,” his campaign manager, Bill Stepien, testified before the committee. “And then we pegged that at, you know, 5, maybe 10 percent based on recounts.”
Stepien added that Trump believed him: “He was pretty realistic with our viewpoint, in agreement with our viewpoint of kind of the forecast and the uphill climb we thought he had.”
Still, Trump continued to insist he had won. His legal team largely walked away from the case, and was replaced by former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and litigator Sidney Powell, who began to make wild fraud allegations, to the dismay of White House attorneys, who warned Trump they were false.
The president grabbed hold of a development in a rural, conservative county in Michigan, where voting machines had initially undercounted his margin of victory. Human error turned out to be the cause. When the paper ballots were tallied and run back through the machine, they were counted correctly.
Trump knew this, the committee says, because Attorney General William Barr told him so on Dec. 1, 2020. Barr testified that he told the president that the paper ballot tally matched the final results. Yet the next day, Trump said in a speech: “In one Michigan county, as an example, that used Dominion systems, they found that nearly 6,000 votes had been wrongly switched from Trump to Biden, and this is just the tip of the…