The former president of the United States, Donald Trump (2017-2021), raised hundreds of millions of dollars from his supporters with his bogus theories of voter fraud, Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren said today.
Lofgren, who is part of the committee investigating the assault on the Capitol, committed on January 6, 2021 by a mob of Trump supporters, argued that this used his lies about fraud in the 2020 presidential election (in which the current president of the United States, Democrat Joe Biden, prevailed) to “swindle” his followers, to whom he said that their donations would serve to pay for the litigation with which he disputed the electoral result and that were dismissed by the courts.
“The big lie was also a big scam”Lofgren stressed. The second hearing of the committee investigating the assault on Capitol Hill is focused on the disinformation campaign created by Trump and his allies to promote lies about fraud in the 2020 elections.
“Today we will tell you the story of how Trump lost the election, he knew he had lost the election, and as a result of that loss, decided to launch an attack on our democracy”, summed up the chairman of the committee, Democrat Bennie Thompson.
Before the hearing started, the committee announced that its star witnessformer Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien will not be able to testify because his wife went into labor and, instead, the public will have to settle for a brief that his lawyer will read.
Stepien ran Trump’s re-election campaign from July 2020 through the November election and had previously been “number two” in that political operation. The second witness is Chris Stirewaltwho was director of digital strategy for the Politics section of the conservative network Fox News.
Stirewalt was fired after Fox announced that Biden had won the state of Arizonasomething that was later disputed by Trump.
The other witnesses are Benjamin Ginsberga veteran Republican election attorney, and BJay Pak, the former attorney general for the Northern District of Georgia who resigned after Trump pressured state officials to overturn Biden’s victory in that state.
The last to testify in front of the committee will be Al Schmidt, a Republican on the Philadelphia City Commission who defended the vote count in that city against the attacks of the former president. The committee is made up of a majority of Democratic congressmen, although there are two Republican members -Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger- who are at odds with Trump.
In the assault on the Capitol, five people died, including a police officer after suffering a heart attack hours later, and about 140 agents were attacked. In addition, four policemen subsequently committed suicide.
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