Several aides to the former president also said they tried to tell Trump he had lost.
A pattern emerged during Monday’s hearing of the Jan. 6 select committee. Aides of former President Donald Trump repeatedly told him the election was over or nearly impossible to overturn. He had lost.
In numerous video recordings, they admitted they found Trump’s fraud claims untrue — and that he did indeed lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
The committee chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), said the investigation would show how “Donald Trump lost an election and knew he lost an election and, as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy.”
On election night, numerous aides advised Trump against declaring victory but to instead wait for his campaign team to draw more data. Fox News, a favorite Trump news outlet, had called the Arizona race for Biden, but votes were still being counted elsewhere. Instead of listening to his own campaign advisers, however, the irritated ex-president leaned on the advice of Rudy Giuliani, who was described multiple times by witnesses as “inebriated” and had told a crowd of his most loyal supporters still gathered at the White House, “frankly we did win this election.”
According to testimony presented by the committee, or told in personal accounts elsewhere, the aides and advisers who so far have called Trump’s claims unproven and his conspiracy theories false include: