House Jan. 6 Committee: Trump Planned To Declare Victory Regardless Of Election Results

WASHINGTON ― The House Jan. 6 committee investigating former President Donald Trump’s coup attempt to hang on to power after his losing the 2020 election showed that the former president planned before a single vote had been counted to simply declare victory, regardless of the outcome.

“This plan to declare victory was in place before any of the votes had been counted,” California Democrat Zoe Lofgren said, pointing to evidence collected from video of Trump adviser Roger Stone, testimony from former campaign manager Brad Parscale and a memo from Trump supporter Tom Fitton.

She also played audio from Trump adviser Steve Bannon from days before the election in which he boasted that Trump was simply going to declare that he won. “If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit,” Bannon said.

“It was intentional, it was premeditated, it was not based on any election results,” Lofgren said. “It was concocted in advance to convince his supporters that he won.”

Committee leaders, meanwhile, reminded Americans of the key points from the previous hearings from this summer: the source of the evidence they have presented, and the centrality of Trump himself.

“The central cause of Jan. 6 was one man: Donald Trump,” said committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who lost her House seat in a primary because of her participation on the committee.

Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, pointed out that critics who call the committee’s work a “partisan” attack on Trump are missing a key point: The committee has relied on Trump’s own former aides, campaign officials, party officials and even his family for their information.

“All this evidence comes almost entirely from Republicans,” Thompson said.

“What we’re going to be doing is taking a step back,” a committee aide said Wednesday on condition of anonymity. “We’re going to be looking at that entire plan, that entire multipart plan to overturn the election, and we’re going to be looking at it in a broader context and a broader timeline as well.”

The presentation, expected to last about two and a half hours, will offer new information starting from before the election to after the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, the aide said. (Watch the hearing live below.)

Among the new information would be evidence gleaned from “hundreds of thousands of pages” of documents provided by the Secret Service following the committee’s subpoena.

“We’re going to bring a particular focus on the former president’s state of mind, and his involvement in these events as they unfolded,” the aide said.

Thursday’s hearing had been planned for Sept. 28, but was postponed for two weeks because of Hurricane Ian’s landfall in Florida.

The committee is planning to issue a written report of its findings after the November midterm elections and will almost certainly cease to exist if Republicans take control of the House in January. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California has denounced the committee as an attack on Trump ― even though he had personally begged Trump to call off his mob during the Jan. 6 attack.

In its previous hearings that began on June 9, the committee has presented evidence that Trump was repeatedly told by his own staff that he had lost the 2020 election but continued with his lies about “voter fraud” anyway; that he applied pressure to his vice president, Mike Pence, to simply declare him the winner during the Jan. 6 certification ceremony; that he attempted to coerce officials in states narrowly won by Joe Biden, especially Georgia, to reverse the election results in favor of Trump; and that he attempted to subvert the Justice Department into falsely backing his claims of a “stolen” election.

The originally unplanned sixth hearing, on June 28, came about after top Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson disclosed attempts to intimidate her from sharing explosive revelations about Trump’s actions on and leading up to Jan. 6. And on July 12, the committee’s seventh hearing showed how both Trump and key outside advisers knew all along that he planned to lead his mob’s march to the Capitol to pressure Pence and lawmakers into overturning the election and letting him remain in power.

And in what was to have been the final hearing on July 21, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, a Republican and vice chair of the panel, announced that the committee would continue holding them because of all the new information that it was receiving from witnesses. “The dam is beginning to break,” she said.

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.

In statements on his personal social media platform, Trump has continued to lie about the election and the Jan. 6 committee’s work, calling it a “hoax” similar to previous investigations into his 2016 campaign’s acceptance of Russian assistance and his attempted extortion of Ukraine into helping his 2020 campaign.