Panel Suggests Trump Knew He Lost the Election, Eyeing Criminal Case

Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel, also tried to get Mr. Trump to stop pursuing baseless claims of fraud. He pushed back against a plan from a rogue Justice Department lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, who wanted to distribute official letters to multiple state legislatures falsely alerting them that the election may have been stolen and urging them to reconsider certified election results.

“That letter that this guy wants to send — that letter is a murder-suicide pact,” Mr. Cipollone told Mr. Trump, according to Mr. Donoghue. “It’s going to damage everyone who touches it. And we should have nothing to do with that letter. I don’t ever want to see that letter again.”

The account is part of a court filing in a civil case in California, in which the committee’s lawyers for the first time laid out their theory of a potential criminal case against the former president. They said they had evidence demonstrating that Mr. Trump, the lawyer John Eastman and other allies could be charged with obstructing an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the American people and common law fraud.

The committee’s filing shows how some of Mr. Trump’s aides and advisers repeatedly — and passionately — tried to get him to back down from his various false claims and plans to try to stay in power.

It started almost immediately after the polls closed in November 2020, when members of Mr. Trump’s campaign data team began trying to break through to the president to impress upon him that he had been defeated.

During a conversation in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump’s lead campaign data guru “delivered to the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose,” Jason Miller, another top campaign aide, told the panel. The president said he disagreed with the data expert’s analysis, Mr. Miller said, because he thought he could win in court.

Mr. Miller also told the committee that he agreed with Attorney General William P. Barr’s analysis that there had not been widespread fraud in the election, and “said that to the president on multiple occasions,” the panel wrote in its filing.

orcinyadders on March 4th, 2022 at 03:52 UTC »

He was going to deny the results no matter what, and we knew that because he already did it. He denied the results in 2016 despite his win, and he denied Ted Cruz. People who didn’t see this coming are effing thick.

ScotTheDuck on March 4th, 2022 at 02:57 UTC »

Skip the article and go straight to the deposition transcripts if you have time. There's a lot in here about Trump's efforts to fire the acting Attorney General, and from people who were telling him as early as November 7 that he had lost.

Wiskkey on March 4th, 2022 at 02:35 UTC »

Excerpt:

Shortly after the 2020 election, as ballots were still being counted, the top data expert in President Donald J. Trump’s re-election campaign told him bluntly that he was going to lose.

[...]

Yet Mr. Trump — time and again — discounted the facts, the data and many of his own advisers as he continued to promote the lie of a stolen election, according to hundreds of pages of exhibits, interview transcripts and email correspondence assembled by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack for a legal filing released late Wednesday.

In laying out the account, the panel revealed the basis of what its investigators believe could be a criminal case against Mr. Trump. At its core is the argument that, in repeatedly rejecting the truth that he had lost the 2020 election — including the assertions of his own campaign aides, White House lawyers, two successive attorneys general and federal investigators — Mr. Trump was not just being stubborn or ignorant about his defeat, he was knowingly perpetrating a fraud on the United States.

This is a different article from yesterday's related NY Times article.