Washington | The attorney general, a slew of advisers, and even his daughter… presented a House committee on Monday with a disturbing timeline of how Donald Trump is trying to cling to power after his 2020 presidential defeat by claiming that the election was “stolen.” From him, despite repeated denials from his closest supporters.
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Zoe Lofgren, the Democratic-elected member of this group that seeks to shed light on the responsibility of the Republican billionaire in the attack on the United States Congress by his supporters on January 6, 2021, said.
After nearly a year of investigation, the commission on Monday delivered a painstaking report on the former president’s maneuvers between presidential election night and the attack on Capitol Hill.
- Listen to Luc Laliberté’s column in microphone Geneviève Pettersen on QUB Radio:
Giuliani “Drunk”
A few hours after the polls closed on November 3, 2020, Joe Biden and Donald Trump seemed to be on the lookout. “It became clear that the election would not be decided that night,” Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and one of his closest advisers at the time, said in testimony released by the committee on Monday.
However, shortly before 2:30 AM, Donald Trump appeared in front of American television from the living rooms of the White House. He says, “Honestly, we won the election,” despite the current count.
“It was too early to make that kind of decision,” Donald Trump’s campaign manager Bill Steppin told this group of elected officials.
Who is the only one who encouraged the president in his approach that evening? His personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who, according to one of the president’s advisers who testified before the commission, was “visibly intoxicated.”
Donald Trump is “angry”
On November 7, 2020, just before 11:30 a.m., Joe Biden was declared the winner. On the same day, Donald Trump’s campaign manager attended a meeting with the outgoing president. “We told him what we thought was his chance of winning at this point. [….] That there might have been a 5 or 10% chance,” Bill Stebbin explains.
Mr Stebbin says the president “was getting more and more angry”. The leader decides to change his squads to surround himself with the people who support him on his crusade.
On November 19, this new legal team holds a very perplexing press conference. Sidney Powell, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, accuses Venezuela, Cuba and the Democrats of orchestrating an electoral conspiracy.
For his part, Rudy Giuliani denounced the “blatant Iron Curtain of Censorship”. Under the heat of the lights, a brown liquid, hair dye, begins to drip onto her temples.
“Nonsense”
Four days later, Attorney General Bill Barr visited the White House. “It was a bit embarrassing,” the minister said in a video tape broadcast by the commission on Monday.
On several occasions, he said, the two men together examined alleged electoral fraud introduced by Donald Trump. Nonsense, according to the Minister of Justice.
“I was demoralized, because I said to myself ‘It’s crazy, if he really believes in all this, he really is detached from reality,’” confirmed Bill Barr, who will resign on December 14.
The committee argued the following month, Donald Trump and his entourage would continue to tell “these lies” about electoral fraud for fundraising. She revealed that her campaign team, which floods her supporters with dozens of emails a day, raises $250 million between Election Day and January 6, 2021.
“The Big Lie was also a big fraud,” criticized Zoe Lofgren, who is known for working on the impeachment of three presidents before Congress: Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton … and Donald Trump.
During four hearings over the next few days, the so-called “January 6” commission will continue to present its findings in the year of the investigation, putting the former White House tenant at the center of the “attempted coup.”
The main interested party, Donald Trump, once again denounced the commission’s work on Monday, calling it a “witch hunt,” which, he says, is “a disgrace to America.”