The hearings by the House Select Committee To Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol are providing the details to back up what we already knew about former President Donald Trump’s outlandish theories of voter fraud. On Monday, in live and video testimony, people including Trump’s closest campaign advisers, top government officials, and family members recounted how the defeated president publicly made claims he had been assured were false in order to stay in power. “He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” former Attorney General William Barr testified in his interview with the committee.
While many Republicans have downplayed the seriousness of the January 6 insurrection, the hearings are reminding the public that nine people died in the riot and its aftermath, including a Trump supporter shot and killed by Capitol police. More than 800 people have been arrested, and members of two extremist groups have been indicted on sedition charges over their roles in storming the Capitol.
Among the standouts of Monday’s hearing was new information about Trump’s fundraising effort that collected some $250 million for the Official Election Defense Fund — a fund that did not exist, with the money raised instead going to Trump’s political action committee — and a full debunking of the “2000 Mules” documentary that has tricked many Americans into believing in a conspiracy to steal the election of 2020.
In discussing the Official Election Defense Fund, Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-California) said, “Not only was there the big lie, there was the big ripoff.” The former president’s political action committee used the money raised from donors worried about election integrity to send $1 million to the nonprofit where former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is now a top official; another $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, home to several former Trump administration officials; $5 million to the company that ran the January 6, 2021, rally on the Ellipse; and more than $200,000 to Trump-owned hotels.
As for the documentary directed by commentator Dinesh D’Souza, claiming to prove widespread fraud, “2000 Mules” used cell phone location data to show that people passed by drop boxes, supposedly casting fraudulent votes. The data do not have the “granularity” to prove anything, as the people may have just walked or driven by, investigators found. In his testimony, Barr said he was “unimpressed” with the film and that the “photographic evidence” did not hold up.
“If you take 2 million cell phones and figure out where they are physically in a big city like Atlanta or wherever, just by definition, you’re going to find many hundreds of them have passed by and spend time in the vicinity of these boxes,” Barr said. “The premise that, if you go by a box, five boxes or whatever it was, you know that that’s a mule, is just indefensible.”
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