WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump’s own attorney general told the then-president that his claims of a “stolen” election were “bullshit,” according to videotaped testimony revealed Thursday night at the House Jan. 6 select committee’s first public hearing.
“I told the president it was bullshit, and I didn’t want to be a part of it,” Barr told committee investigators during his deposition.
Committee chair Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, told Americans that Jan. 6 was the culmination of a “conspiracy” to hold onto power. “Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” he said. “The violence was no accident.”
Thursday’s prime-time hearing, carried live by all three major broadcast networks, is the first of a half dozen sessions the committee plans to hold before the end of the month. Committee members hope to show Americans how Trump was at the center of a scheme to remain in power despite having lost reelection.
The next hearing is set for Monday morning; the one after for Wednesday morning, and the third for next Thursday afternoon.
Trump and his allies spent the days leading up to the hearing trying to delegitimize it by calling it partisan — even though it has two GOP members, including the vice chair, Wyoming’s Liz Cheney — and saying it’s out to get him.
House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who according to newly released audio favored a committee to investigate Jan. 6 before he spoke extensively to Trump and changed his mind, said at a Thursday-morning news conference: “It is the most political and least legitimate committee in American history.”
And Trump himself in a series of posts on his own social media platform repeated his lie that the 2020 election had been “rigged” and “stolen” from him, and insulted what he called the “unselect” committee.
President Joe Biden, who called on Trump’s mob to disperse on Jan. 6 and called on Trump to ask them to do so, praised the hearing while appearing at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. “A lot of Americans are going to see for the first time some of the details,” he said.
The committee has been working for nearly a year, having interviewed and taken depositions from more than 1,000 witnesses and collected 140,000 pages of documents.
It will expire with this Congress and, if Republicans win control of the chamber as expected, will almost certainly not be renewed.
It was created when Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi decided to move ahead with a “select” committee after Republicans blocked a resolution to create an independent commission, similar to what was done after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. She then nixed McCarthy’s attempt to place election-result denying Trump supporters like Ohio’s Jim Jordan on the committee, which led to McCarthy pulling all of his selections.
Pelosi responded by appointing two Republicans to the committee: Illinois’s Adam Kinzinger and, as vice-chair, Cheney. Both were among the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Jan. 6 attack, and both have been vocal critics of other Republicans who downplay the seriousness of that day or claim that Trump had not done anything wrong.
Trump, despite losing the election by 7 million votes nationally and 306-232 in the Electoral College, became the first president in more than two centuries of elections to refuse to hand over power peacefully. His incitement of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol ― his last-ditch attempt to remain in office ― killed five, including one police officer, injured another 140 officers, and led to four police suicides.
Nevertheless, Trump remains the dominant figure in the Republican Party and is openly speaking about running for the presidency again in 2024.
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