The House January 6 committee heard chilling, tearful testimony Tuesday that Donald Trump’s relentless pressure to overturn the 2020 presidential election provoked widespread threats to the “backbone of our democracy”— election workers and local officials who fended off the defeated president’s demands despite personal risks.
The panel focused on Trump’s personally leaning on local officials in key battleground states to reject ballots outright or to submit alternative electors for the final tally in Congress.
“A handful of election officials in several key states stood between Donald Trump and the upending of American democracy,” Chairman Bennie Thompson said, praising them as heroes and the “backbone of our democracy.”
The committee’s vice chair, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, implored Americans to pay attention to the evidence being presented, declaring, “Donald Trump didn’t care about the threats of violence. He did not condemn them, he made no effort to stop them.” “We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence,” she said.
Trump was directly involved in the scheme to put forward slates of fake pro-Trump electors in states won by Joe Biden. The committee played a deposition video from Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, who testified that Trump had personally called her about helping further the scheme. Trump put his lawyer John Eastman on the phone with McDaniel “to talk about the importance of the RNC helping the campaign gather these contingent electors” she testified.
Arizona Republican House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a stanch Trump supporter rejected Trumps pressure to promote fake electors and said, as a result, he was subjected to a public smear campaign, including relentless bull-horn protests at his home and a pistol-wielding man taunting his family and neighbors.
Bowers walked through what started with a Trump phone call on a Sunday after he returned from church. The defeated president laid out his proposal to have the state replace its electors for Biden with others favoring Trump. “I said, ‘Look, you’re asking me to do something that is counter to my oath,’” Bowers testified. Bowers insisted on seeing Trump’s evidence of voter fraud, which he said Trump’s team never produced beyond vague allegations. He recalled Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani at one point told him, “‘We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.’”
Trump wanted Bowers to hold a hearing at the state Capitol, but the Republican leader said there was already a “circus” atmosphere over the election. The panel showed video footage of protesters at the Arizona statehouse including a key figure, the horned hat-wearing Jacob Chansley, who was later arrested at the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot. Trump nevertheless pressed the Arizona official, including in a follow-up call, suggesting he expected a better response from a fellow Republican.
But Bowers said that because of his faith, including a belief the U.S. Constitution is divinely inspired, what the president was asking him to do was “foreign to my very being.”
Bowers testimony reminds me of the story of the snake. A woman takes in a sick snake and after nursing him back to health the snake bites her. She asks why he did that and the snake replies: Hey you knew I was a snake.
Officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states told similar stories of having their cellphone numbers and home addresses spread publicly after they refused Trump’s demands.
Republican Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, testified about Trump’s phone call asking him to “find 11,780″ votes that could flip his state to prevent Biden’s election victory, and his deputy Gabe Sterling, who became a notable figure during Georgia’s long recount in 2020 when he urged Trump to tone down the rhetoric as someone was going to get killed. He and Sterling, his chief operations officer, detailed their painstaking efforts to count the Georgia vote, investigating one false claim after another of fraud. After a hand recount of 5 million ballots, Biden’s victory was unchanged. “The numbers don’t lie,” said Raffensperger, who said that some 28,000 Georgia voters simply bypassed the presidential race but voted down ballot for others. “At the end of the day, President Trump came up short.
At one gripping moment, two Georgia election workers, a mother and daughter, testified that they lived in fear of saying their names aloud after Trump wrongly accused them of voter fraud. “There were a lot of threats wishing death upon me,” said Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss, a former state election worker.
Giuliana and Trump accused Moss and her mother by name of taking ballots out of suitcases hidden under a table and counting them multiple times based on a video. Moss testified about what happened after Giuliani falsely accused her and her mother of passing around USB drives like “vials of heroin or cocaine” and meddling with votes. In truth, Moss’ mother had passed her a ginger mint, she testified. Raffensperger explained, if you watched the entire video you would see the ballots were in approved ballot boxes and no mishandling of the ballots occurred. This did not deter Trump.
In in-person testimony, Moss, who had worked for Atlanta’s Fulton County elections department since 2012, and her mother, Ruby Freeman, a temporary election worker who spoke earlier to the panel, gripped the audience with their accounts of the fallout from the smear campaign by Trump and Giuliani.
It turned my life upside down, Moss said of the lies which led to threats against her, her mother, and her septuagenarian grandmother, who at one point called her in a panic saying people had come to her home to make a “citizens arrest.”
The FBI advised Ruby Freeman to leave her house before January 6 which she did for 2 months. “There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman testified. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you? The president of the United States is supposed to represent every American, not to target one. But he targeted me.”
The select committee worked to untangle the elaborate “fake electors” scheme that sought to have representatives in as many as seven battlegrounds — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada and New Mexico — sign certificates stating that Trump, not Biden, had won their states.
Conservative law professor John Eastman, a lawyer for Trump, pushed the fake electors in the weeks after the election. Trump and Eastman convened hundreds of electors on a call on Jan. 2, 2021, encouraging them to send alternative slates from their states where Trump’s team was claiming fraud.
The fake electors idea was designed to set up a challenge on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress met in joint session, with Vice President Pence presiding in what is typically a ceremonial role to accept the states’ vote tallies. But the effort collapsed, as Pence refused Trump’s repeated demands that he simply halt the certification of Biden’s win — a power he believed he did not possess in his role. That’s the certification the Capitol mob tried to stop.
The committee showed a text message sent from an aide to Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., to an aide for Vice President Mike Pence the morning of Jan. 6 saying Johnson wanted to give Pence an “alternate slate of electors for MI and WI.” “Do not give that to him,” Pence aide Chris Hodgson replied. And Johnson didn’t, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.
Reporters caught Sen. Johnson leaving the Capitol following the hearing. Walking quickly, he put his phone to his ear and told the reporters that he couldn’t talk, he was on the phone. The reporter replied, I can see your screen, you are not on a call. 🙂 Johnson went on to say he didn’t know about this. One is to believe that his staff was going to give him documents to give to the Vice President of the United States and Johnson didn’t know what they were!
Cheney calle out the more than 30 witnesses who have refused to cooperate with the committee. including several who invoked the Fifth Amendment. She challenged Pat Cipollone, Trumps White House counsel to testify.
Largely taken from The Boston Globe front page of June 22.