In the final weeks of 2022, the Democrat-led U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, attack on the Capitol disclosed thousands of pages of transcripts of interviews the panel’s members and staff conducted with key witnesses.
The transcripts were central to a committee report released in December that held Donald Trump responsible for the 2021 insurrection and referred the former president to the U.S. Justice Department for criminal prosecution.
The voluminous deposition transcripts also revealed other details about what the committee described as a multipart scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Here are four things you may have missed from deep in the transcripts:
Trump continued to press state officials long after Jan. 6.
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, told the committee about Trump’s pressure campaign to find fraud in the 2020 election long after President Joe Biden took office.
Vos, who has held that office since 2013, didn’t speak with Trump between the 2020 election and August 2021, he testified in a Nov. 30, 2022, interview. But the two spoke by phone about 10 times from August 2021 to July 2022, he said.
In those calls, Trump was not nearly as explicit or persistent with Vos as he was with state officials in other parts of the country in the two months between the election and the Capitol attack. But Trump remained fixated on an investigation into potential fraud.
“He did not give any specific recommendations,” Vos said in a deposition. “I believe that he would have liked us to use the things that we discovered to show that there were problems with the 2020 election. But he never specifically said to me, ‘You need to overturn the election.’”
Trump spent a lot of time in those calls complaining of what he perceived to be problems in the 2020 election. He left Vos with the impression that a finding of wide scale fraud in 2021 or 2022 could undo the election.
Vos was sympathetic to Trump’s complaints about voter fraud and told the former president he would seek legislative remedies to prevent issues in the future. But the Wisconsin speaker told Trump “more than once” that nothing could be done about the 2020 results.
Trump felt the election was unfair, and the result could not be justified, Vos said.
“He wanted us to go backwards to try and look and see what we could do about 2020,” Vos said. “I have consistently said we need to look forward, that it’s unconstitutional and impossible for us to go back to what occurred in 2020.”
Vos said he was not involved in efforts to advance false slates of electors, who would cast the state’s Electoral College votes for Trump, including in Wisconsin.
Ginni Thomas regretted her texts, but maintained election doubts
Virginia L. “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist with Nebraska roots who is married to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, said in a Sept. 29, 2022, interview with the panel that she regretted the tone and content of her texts urging Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff and a former Republican U.S. House member from North Carolina, to work to overturn the election.
“I would take them all back if I could today,” she told committee member Adam Schiff, a California Democrat. “I’m not comfortable with any of them being — I wish I could have rewritten them. I wish I didn’t send them. … It was just an emotional time.”
Thomas also said she still reserved doubts about the integrity of the election.
Thomas said that prior to the committee’s revelations, she had been unaware that campaign and administration officials, including Attorney General Bill Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, had rejected claims of fraud. Asked by committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, if Barr or Cipollone’s comments or the Trump campaign’s losses in 61 of 62 court cases would have changed her…
Read More: Trump fixation on Wisconsin, Ginni Thomas text regrets and more from the Jan. 6 panel