The Jan. 6 committee has made clear that Trump long planned to claim victory, whether he actually won or not. His allies were boasting of how they could try to fool the public to make it seem that he had won reelection. The committee cites correspondence from Tom Fitton of the conservative group Judicial Watch to the White House in October 2020 in which Fitton urges Trump to say after polls close: “We had an election. I won.”
The committee also obtained a recording of Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who told associates the week before the election that “what Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Trump had spent months demonizing mail voting, which swelled in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The then-president also insisted the only way he would lose the election would be by massive voter fraud. When Trump did declare victory early in the morning the day after Election Day, he exploited a quirk in vote counting in which in-person votes, which leaned GOP, were tallied first, putting him temporarily ahead. He demanded that local election officials stop counting outstanding ballots, which leaned Democratic.
“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision,” the committee wrote in the executive summary for its report. “It was premeditated.”
Trump fanned other conspiracy theories, too, despite being told they were false. He claimed that more than 5,000 dead people voted in Georgia, a state he lost by more than 11,000 votes. But Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, corrected him during a Jan. 2 phone call, saying local election officials had researched the question, cross-referencing obituaries and other data.
Raffensperger also corrected other Trump claims about Georgia, including that 18,325 voters were registered at vacant addresses and that 4,925 voters from out of state cast ballots there. But Trump repeated them in the run-up to Jan. 6 and during his rally.
“The President then continued, there are ‘more votes than voters,’” Richard Donoghue told the committee of a Dec. 27, 2020, conversation with Trump when Donoghue was the acting deputy attorney general. Donoghue said he told the president that he was comparing 2016 voter registration with 2020 voting numbers, which was inaccurate because more people were registered to vote during Trump’s reelection year. He later specifically warned against using a Pennsylvania number.
Trump also baselessly claimed election workers were committing fraud, despite warnings from his own law enforcement officers that they were doing nothing wrong. Rosen recounted to the committee a Dec. 15 conversation in which Trump asked about a video that purported to show Georgia election workers receiving a suitcase of ballots.
One week later, the report says, Trump declared: “There is even security camera footage from Georgia that shows officials telling poll watchers to leave the room before pulling suitcases of ballots out from under the tables and continuing to count for hours.”
This content was originally published here.
