Ivanka Trump, the daughter of President Donald Trump, is displayed on a screen during a hearing by the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol on June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC.
One of Donald Trump’s top lawyers was drunk on the night that the so-called “Big Lie” sprang into being—and not just on power, the 45th president’s senior aide told the Jan. 6 Committee in a deposition aired on Monday.
As the proceedings began, Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) began with a bold claim that Trump “knew” that he lost before peddling his election fraud allegations, a point widely believed to be central to any possible prosecution of the 45th president in connection with the Capitol attack.
Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) did not hold back either about Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York.
“You will also hear testimony that President Trump rejected the advice of his campaign experts on election night and instead followed the course recommended by an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani to just claim he won and insist that the vote counting stop—to falsely claim everything was fraudulent,” Cheney said.
Shortly into the proceedings, Cheney revealed why she made that claim by rolling tape on a deposition with Trump’s ex-senior advisor Jason Miller.
“I think the Mayor was definitely intoxicated,” Miller said, referring to the night of the initial election returns, not during Giuliani’s press conference marked by his hair-dye meltdown.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) noted that the Trump campaign raised “hundreds of millions of dollars” from supporters who were falsely told their donations would pay for legal challenges.
“The Big Lie was also a big rip-off,” Lofgren said.
The committee’s debut proceedings established that the people closest to Trump debunked that proposition. Former Attorney General Bill Barr flatly called Trump’s election fraud claims “bullshit.” Trump’s eldest daughter Ivanka Trump testified that she trusted Barr’s assessment. Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon even recounted telling the response of then-president’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after being informed that the fraud claims were baseless.
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“So there’s no there there?” Meadows asked, giving an electoral spin to the famous Gertrude Stein quotation.
The committee’s second hearing focused on the lengths Trump went to press claims that failed in more than 60 state and federal courts. Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien had been slated to testify pursuant to a subpoena, but he canceled his appearance on the morning of the hearing due to a medical emergency. His wife reportedly had been in labor.
Stepien had been slated to sit on a panel with ex-Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, who was fired after calling President Joe Biden’s victory in Arizona.
The second panel featured two key lawyers with insight into Trump’s failed legal blitz: ex-Jones Day partner Benjamin Ginsberg, who resigned rather than join his powerhouse firm in trying to overturn the election, and former U.S. Attorney BJay Pak, who previously told the Senate that Trump intended to fire him for not backing his election fraud claims.
Pak is the attorney whom the 45th president called a “Never Trumper” in his infamous phone call urging Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) to “find” 11,780 votes.
The final witness, Al Schmidt, was the sole Republican on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections.
After receiving death threats from Trump supporters because of insistence on counting every vote in the deep blue jurisdiction, Schmidt resigned late last year.
This is a developing story.
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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