Former Donald Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien will be among witnesses to testify on Monday before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the United States Capitol, announced the panel on Sunday (12). Stepien will testify under subpoena, he told the CNN .
Aides to the committee said the hearing would examine how former President Donald Trump embraced false allegations of fraud in the 2020 election and how he decided to declare victory in the hours after the election, although he was told the numbers weren’t certain yet.
The hearing seeks to show how Trump’s team sought legal challenges in court and lost those cases, and that the former president chose to ignore the rulings and continued to try to overturn the election.
“We will reveal information about how the former president’s political apparatus uses these stolen election fraud lies to raise hundreds of millions of dollars between election day and January 6,” the aides added.
The hearing will also seek to connect Trump’s lies about the election to violence at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, aides said, including how protesters echoed the former president’s baseless claims that the election had been stolen.
Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, a member of the select committee, will play a “key role” in the presentation, but the audience will technically be led by President Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi.
In addition to live witness testimonies, aides said the panel will continue to show more presentations and video recordings of closed-door depositions.
Other witnesses expected to testify on Monday, according to the committee, include Chris Stirewalt, a former political director at Fox; BJay Pak, former US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia; Al Schmidt, former Philadelphia City Commissioner; and Republican election attorney Ben Ginsberg.
Two sources familiar with the matter previously told the CNN that Ginsberg must testify that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election, despite claims by Trump and his supporters. He will also talk about the failed lawsuits filed by the former president’s team.
Ginsberg is considered a leading Republican expert on voter fraud and played a critical role in Florida’s 2000 recount case, when George W. Bush defeated then-Vice President Al Gore.
Even before the last presidential election in September 2020, Ginsberg spoke about the weakness of the former president’s claim of widespread voter fraud and criticized the claims as lacking in evidence and “untenable”.
Stepien, a former Trump campaign manager, is advising the campaign of Wyoming Republican Harriett Hageman, who has the former president’s backing in her key challenge to Representative Liz Cheney. Cheney serves as vice chairman of the January 6 committee.
Stepien’s company received more than $190,000 from the Hageman campaign this election cycle for strategy and fundraising advice and video production, according to federal election documents.
Pak and Schmidt’s home states, Georgia and Pennsylvania, respectively, were key states in Trump’s campaign efforts to potentially overturn the 2020 election results.
Stirewalt was fired by Fox in January 2021 after criticism by Republicans of the network’s decision to declare Joe Biden’s Arizona victory during the 2020 presidential election.
After his resignation, Stirewalt wrote in a Los Angeles Times article that the refusal of many of Trump’s supporters to believe the election results was a “tragic consequence of the information malnutrition that so afflicts the nation.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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