Jan. 6 Panel HearingsJan. 6 Hearings Day 4: Panel Ties Trump to False Electors Plan
Donald J. Trump was personally involved in a scheme to put forward fake electors, the House committee revealed at a hearing that highlighted the pressure that state officials faced to overturn the election results.
Follow our live coverage of the Jan. 6 hearings.
The fourth hearing held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol focused on the elaborate efforts by President Donald J. Trump and his allies to hijack one of the foundations of democracy: the process behind the peaceful transfer of power.
The committee laid out evidence showing how Mr. Trump led a campaign that played out in two related ways: applying direct pressure on Republican officials in swing states to reverse his loss, and pursuing a plan to name “alternate” slates of electors intended to tilt the Electoral College result in Mr. Trump’s favor.
The hearing demonstrated the human costs of the waves of threats and intimidation set off by Mr. Trump and his supporters as they pressured state officials and election workers to find a way to deprive Joseph R. Biden Jr. of his victory.
Here are four takeaways.
Trump was directly involved in the ‘fake electors’ plan.
The committee showed evidence that Mr. Trump was directly involved behind the scenes in trying to put forward the alternate slates of Trump electors that he hoped could replace the electors awarded to Mr. Biden through his victories in swing states like Arizona and Georgia.
Mr. Trump called Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, to ask her to talk to one of his outside lawyers, John Eastman, who was on the line, about the plan, Ms. McDaniel said in a video clip of her deposition to the committee. Mr. Trump wanted Ms. McDaniel, she said, to talk to Mr. Eastman “about the importance of the R.N.C. helping the campaign gather these contingent electors” if Mr. Trump’s legal challenges were successful.
As Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman were undertaking the scheme, the White House Counsel’s Office held a meeting with Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani; the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows; and other aides, where they were told that the plan was not legally sound, according to recorded testimony from a West Wing aide, Cassidy Hutchinson.
The committee did not say whether Mr. Trump was told about the meeting with the White House Counsel’s Office. Last week, the panel revealed that Mr. Trump had been told by Mr. Eastman that the broader effort they were pursuing to convince Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay certification of the Electoral College count in Mr. Biden’s favor had no legal basis — a fact that legal experts say could help prosecutors build a criminal case against Mr. Trump.
G.O.P. elected officials pushed the electors scheme.
The committee showed that Republicans in Congress were pushing the alternate electors plan even on Jan. 6, hours before the day’s violence, which had the effect of stopping the certification of the electoral count as Mr. Pence was whisked away from the mob.
According to text messages obtained by the committee, an aide to Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, told an aide for Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 that Mr. Johnson wanted to give Mr. Pence a list of Trump electors from Michigan and Wisconsin, two states won by Mr. Biden.
“Johnson needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise,” Sean Riley, an aide to Mr. Johnson, texted an aide to Mr. Pence, according to messages released by the committee.
“What is it?” Chris Hodgson, the aide to Mr. Pence, replied.
“Alternate slate of electors for MI and WI because archivist didn’t receive them,” Mr. Riley said.
“Do not give that to him,” Mr. Hodgson texted back.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Johnson, Alexa Henning, said on Twitter that he “had no involvement in the creation of an alternate slate of electors and had no foreknowledge that it was going to be delivered to our office.”
The communications with the vice president’s office, she said, were “staff to staff” and the documents were never sent to Mr. Pence.
On the morning of Jan. 6, another Trump ally on Capitol Hill, Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, reached out to Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives and a Republican, to see if he would support the decertification of Arizona’s electors for Mr. Biden.
“I said I would not,” Mr. Bowers recounted telling Mr. Biggs.
Trump’s allies could not produce evidence of election fraud.
The committee showed examples of how Mr. Trump and his allies knew that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen.
Mr. Bowers recounted how Mr. Giuliani acknowledged to him at one point in a phone call that they could not find the evidence of fraud that they needed.
“He said, ‘We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence,’” Mr. Bowers recalled Mr. Giuliani telling him. “And I don’t know if that was a gaffe or maybe he didn’t think through what he said, but both myself and others in my group, the three in my group and my counsel, both remembered that specifically, and afterwards, we kind of laughed about it.”
At another point, Mr. Eastman was pressing Mr. Bowers to embrace the plan to push a slate of Trump electors from Arizona despite the state’s certification of Mr. Biden’s victory there. Mr. Bowers said that he questioned how he could legally participate in the scheme and that Mr. Eastman responded by saying, “Just do it and let the courts sort it out.”
Threats and intimidation started well before Jan. 6.
The public pressure that Mr. Trump and his allies put on state election officials resulted in the officials being targeted in frightening and intimidating ways by Trump supporters.
Shaye Moss, an elections worker in Fulton County, Ga., who, along with her mother, had been falsely accused by Mr. Giuliani of committing election fraud, provided a dramatic portrait of the harassment that Mr. Giuliani’s false claims had spawned. She described the racist messages she received on Facebook.
“A lot of threats, wishing death upon me, telling me that, you know, I’ll be in jail with my mother and saying things like, ‘Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920,’” Ms. Moss said.
She said that the entire episode, and the attention that came with it, had “turned my life upside down.”
“I don’t want anyone knowing my name,” she said. “I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I haven’t been anywhere at all. I’ve gained about 60 pounds. I just don’t do nothing anymore. I don’t want to go anywhere.”
She said she loved her job as an election worker but ultimately quit.
Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, recounted how the home of his son’s widow had been broken into.
Mr. Bowers was the target of protests and threats as his daughter was dying. And he described how his office had received over 20,000 emails and tens of thousands of voice mail messages and texts that made it impossible for him and his staff to communicate.
“It is the new pattern or a pattern in our lives to worry what will happen on Saturdays because we have various groups come by and they have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician and blaring loudspeakers in my neighborhood,” Mr. Bowers said.
Chris Cameron contributed reporting.
As the fourth Jan. 6 committee hearing wrapped up, Representative Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is the panel’s vice chairwoman, divided advisers to former President Donald J. Trump into two groups: those who, in her words, have done what is “right” by cooperating with the committee’s work, and those who have not.
But her eventual target was Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel who, according to several former officials, was key in trying to rein in Mr. Trump’s frenzied efforts to cling to office in the final weeks of his presidency.
Ms. Cheney was amplifying pressure on Mr. Cipollone to appear at a public hearing. The committee has been trying in private discussions to get him to do so — unsuccessfully so far.
“The American people have not yet heard from Mr. Trump’s former White House counsel,” Ms. Cheney said, detailing aspects of the pressure campaign that Mr. Trump brought on state officials to make changes to the election outcome.
She said the committee’s evidence showed that Mr. Cipollone and officials in his office — working with people like Attorney General William P. Barr and then Mr. Barr’s successor, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen — “tried to do what was right.”
“They tried to stop a number of President Trump’s plans for Jan. 6,” Ms. Cheney said, adding: “But we think the American people deserve to hear from Mr. Cipollone personally. He should appear before this committee, and we are working to secure his testimony.”
Mr. Cipollone was witness to a number of false claims and outlandish attempts to use whatever levers Mr. Trump could employ to remain in office. According to testimony from others, Mr. Cipollone was among those telling Mr. Trump’s aides that some of his plans, including one involving alternate or fake slates of electors, exceeded the limits of the law.
Yet unlike other witnesses, Mr. Cipollone, as the Trump White House’s top lawyer, has complicated issues related to executive privilege, as well as possible issues related to attorney-client privilege. A person close to Mr. Cipollone, who was not authorized to speak publicly, mentioned both in explaining why he had not agreed to appear at a public hearing and said the committee had acknowledged that reality.
The person said Mr. Cipollone, who sat for an interview behind closed doors, had been “cooperative with the committee with President Trump’s permission.”
Ms. Cheney made clear that Mr. Cipollone would continue to be a factor even if the committee could not obtain his public testimony, with other witnesses talking about him and his actions. But Mr. Cipollone, who rarely gives interviews, has shown no desire to testify in public.
It remains to be seen if the committee will decide to issue a subpoena for him to appear, as officials have with others.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIt was not long after President Donald J. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, appeared at a legislative hearing in Georgia in early December 2020 and played a video that supposedly showed election workers in Atlanta taking ballots from a suitcase and feeding them into voting machines that Shaye Moss’s life suddenly changed.
Even though the accusations were quickly debunked by state and federal investigators, they went viral, amplified by Mr. Trump himself and by right-wing media outlets. Soon, Ms. Moss — who was in the video working with her mother, Ruby Freeman, counting votes on Election Day — started getting harassing calls and texts.
Many of the threats were racist in nature, Ms. Moss told the Jan. 6 committee at its hearing on Tuesday, and like her mother, she almost immediately became afraid of leaving the house. Ms. Freeman fled her own home after the F.B.I. warned her that she could be in danger. People even showed up at Ms. Moss’s grandmother’s house seeking to track Ms. Moss down, she recalled, in order to make a “citizen’s arrest.”
Ms. Moss’s plaintive testimony to the House committee was emblematic of the abuse and intimidation that many election workers and officials suffered as Mr. Trump attacked the electoral process and tried to persuade lawmakers in key swing states to ignore the will of voters and throw him the election.
“It’s turned my life upside down,” Ms. Moss said of the effort by Mr. Trump and his allies. “It’s affected my life in a major way, in every way, all because of lies.”
Ms. Moss said she had first heard about the accusations against her and her mother shortly after Mr. Giuliani appeared at the state legislative hearing and compared the two women to drug dealers. She told the committee that when she looked at her Facebook messages, there were death threats and other “horrible things.”
A few weeks later, Mr. Trump mentioned Ms. Moss’s name several times in a phone call with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in which he asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes — enough to win the election in Georgia. Right-wing media outlets like The Gateway Pundit and One America News Network also seized on conspiracy theories about Ms. Moss and her mother.
In a recorded interview played by the committee, Ms. Freeman described the results of the attacks, saying she had lost her “sense of security” because Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani and others had “decided to scapegoat” her and her daughter.
“There is nowhere I feel safe, nowhere,” Ms. Freeman said in the recording. “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.”
Ivanka Trump, the elder daughter of former President Donald J. Trump, told a documentary film crew in the middle of December 2020 that her father should “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted” because people were questioning “the sanctity of our elections.”
The video, which was played for The New York Times by someone with access to it, was part of a trove that the filmmaker Alex Holder turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. He recorded several hours of interviews with Mr. Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, some of Mr. Trump’s adult children and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Mr. Holder is expected to be interviewed by the committee on Thursday.
Neither Mr. Holder nor the committee has disclosed the contents of the full trove of videos, and neither has commented on whether it provides substantial new information about Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse his election loss.
But the small piece of it seen by The Times was striking for how it shows Ms. Trump using a different tone in describing her father’s efforts to overturn the outcome than she did in the portion of her deposition to the House committee that has been made public so far.
The interview for the documentary was conducted on Dec. 10, 2020, the person with access to the video said. That was nine days after a public statement by Attorney General William P. Barr, who declared at the time that there was no widespread fraud impacting the election’s outcome, a rare public rebuke of Mr. Trump’s claims at the time.
In her recorded interview with the House committee, Ms. Trump said that Mr. Barr’s comments “affected my perspective.”
“I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he said,” she said. The committee may release additional video of her recorded testimony.
People close to Ms. Trump have insisted that she had distanced herself from what was taking place around her father at that time. Those people have said that, after the race was called for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Ms. Trump began focusing on winding down her office and looking toward a new life in Miami.
Yet in the video with the filmmaker, Ms. Trump, describing her father’s gains in votes among key demographic groups, had a different reaction when asked whether she had a “take” on her father’s “very clear position on the results and what’s going on.”
“I think that, as the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless,” Ms. Trump replied. “And I think a lot of Americans feel very, very disenfranchised right now, and really, question the sanctity of our elections, and that’s not right, it’s not acceptable.”
She went on, “And he has to take on this fight. Look, you fight for what you love the most and he loves this country and he loves this country’s people, and he wants to make sure that their voice is, is heard and not muted.”
She said that he “will continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted and that’s what he should do.”
An aide to Ms. Trump did not respond to a message about the new video.
The filmmaker was connected to Mr. Kushner by Jason Greenblatt, a former lawyer at the Trump Organization and then the White House envoy to the Middle East. The film was envisioned as a legacy project for Mr. Trump, according to two people familiar with how it came about.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOn the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, called his state’s House speaker, Rusty Bowers, and asked him to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Bowers testified on Tuesday.
Later that day, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, sought to hand deliver fake electors from his state and from Michigan to Vice President Mike Pence, texts released by the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack showed. An aide to Mr. Pence, told of Mr. Johnson’s intention, responded to an aide to the senator, “Don’t give that to him.”
The two revelations, which came in the first hour of the select committee’s fourth hearing, illustrated that two of former President Donald J. Trump’s closest allies in Congress were more deeply involved than previously known in Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
Previous reporting by The New York Times showed how a half-dozen right-wing members of Congress became key foot soldiers in the efforts, working closely with the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
But the committee showed that Mr. Johnson, who ultimately voted to certify the election results after initially planning to object to them, had sought in the hours before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol to give a fake slate of electors to Mr. Pence.
“Johnson needs to hand something to VPOTUS please advise,” Sean Riley, an aide to Mr. Johnson, texted an aide to Mr. Pence, according to messages released by the committee.
“What is it?” Chris Hodgson, the aide to Mr. Pence, replied.
“Alternate slate of electors for MI and WI because archivist didn’t receive them,” Mr. Riley said.
“Do not give that to him,” Mr. Hodgson texted back.
In a post on Twitter on Tuesday, Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for Mr. Johnson, blamed the discussion on his chief of staff.
“The senator had no involvement in the creation of an alternate slate of electors and had no foreknowledge that it was going to be delivered to our office,” she said, calling the communication “a staff to staff exchange.”
In separate testimony before the committee, Mr. Bowers said that as he faced pressure from Mr. Trump and his associates to help overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s win in Arizona, he also received a call from Mr. Biggs, a hard-right congressman from his home state.
“He asked if I would sign on, both to a letter that had been sent from my state, and/or that I would support the decertification of the electors,” Mr. Bowers told the committee. “And I said I would not.”
Aishvarya Kavi contributed reporting.
Today’s witnesses have made clear that the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 helped insert violence into American elections. That reality is underscored by warnings from the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security that the persistence of “the big lie” is radicalizing Americans and amping up the domestic extremist threat.
In his closing remarks, Thompson reminds viewers that they have heard about many unlawful and unconstitutional schemes to undo the election, but that the committee aims to show that Trump was the “driving force” behind them all.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTAnother consequence of the effort to undermine the 2020 election: an unwillingness of people to want to work on elections in the future. Temporary workers are the backbone of elections.
Today’s accounts have brought home how Trump and his allies unleashed severe harassment upon election workers and their families. Giuliani used charged language likening Shaye Moss, an election worker in Georgia and a Black woman, to a low-level drug dealer. That language was followed by a wave of online threats and harassment against Moss and her mother, as well as an attempt to break into her grandmother’s house. Raffensperger testified that Trump’s allies broke into his widowed daughter-in-law’s house and that his wife received threats.
With a sharp focus on the pressure applied to election officials to overturn the 2020 results, leaders of the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol sought on Tuesday to show that former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of election fraud were a significant threat to the nation’s election system, and democracy itself.
Lawmakers repeatedly emphasized that the claims by Mr. Trump and his supporters were already having a detrimental effect on the conduct of elections and could have dire consequences in the years ahead if allowed to take hold.
“The president’s lie was and is a dangerous cancer on this body politic,” said Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who was leading the questioning by the panel at its fourth hearing. “If you could convince Americans they cannot trust their own elections, anytime they lose is somehow illegitimate, then what is left but violence to determine who should govern?”
Representative Bennie G. Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the committee, noted that Republican elections officials in one county in New Mexico earlier this month refused to certify primary election results, citing no evidence of fraud beyond a belief that the machines were rigged. A court ultimately ordered them to certify the outcome.
Mr. Thompson said that episode was an illustration of the deep and enduring repercussions that could result from the president’s actions to undermine the election and claim widespread fraud without any proof.
“The lie has not gone away,” Mr. Thompson said. “It is corrupting our democratic institutions.” Mr. Thompson asked if elections officials like those in New Mexico were to surrender to lies and suspicion, “who will make sure our institutions do not break under the pressure?”
“We will not have close calls,” he said, “we will have a catastrophe.”
Election watchdogs have sounded the alarm that many people who deny the outcome of the 2020 election are seeking oversight roles in the coming elections and some have already had success in gaining those positions. The leaders of the committee are hoping that the evidence and testimony at the hearings helps Americans recognize the threat posed by widespread lack of confidence in the legitimacy of elections at all levels.
“We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence,” said Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is vice chair of the special committee.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTLast summer, long after the 2020 election had been decided, the Justice Department was concerned enough about continuing threats to election workers that it took an unusual step: Officials created a special task force of prosecutors and investigators dedicated to holding accountable anyone who intimidated or hurt people who worked administering the electoral process.
“A threat to any election official, worker or volunteer is a threat to democracy,” Lisa O. Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said at the time. “We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders to protect the rights of American voters, to punish those who engage in this criminal behavior and to send the unmistakable message that such conduct will not be tolerated.”
The issue of threats against election workers is being highlighted on Tuesday at the latest hearing by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The final witness appearing at the hearing is Shaye Moss, an election worker in Georgia who was subject to threats and intimidation after being falsely accused by Trump supporters of working to rig the outcome of the election in that state in 2020.
The Justice Department task force was created at a time when large numbers of election officials across the country were resigning or retiring, citing the increased stress and fear related to the job. In one survey taken last year, one in three election officials said they felt unsafe.
Last week, a Nebraska man pleaded guilty to threatening Colorado’s secretary of state on Instagram, the first conviction resulting from the task force’s work.
Task force officials have publicly identified two other criminal cases that they are involved with. One concerns a Texas man accused of sending election-related threats to officials in Georgia, and the other centers on a Nevada man who the authorities say made menacing phone calls to an election employee in the Nevada secretary of state’s office.
Raffensperger attributed Trump’s loss in Georgia to 28,000 voters who skipped voting in the presidential race in 2020 but voted in down-ballot races. “There were no votes to find,” he says. “That was an accurate count that had been certified.”
As Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, participates in today’s hearing, keep in mind that he recently testified before a grand jury in Georgia as part of the state’s criminal investigation into Trump and his allies. Given that Raffensperger is speaking under oath at the hearing, it’s safe to assume that what he tells the public today is in keeping with what he told the grand jury.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Witnesses
While she is not a household name, Shaye Moss, who is scheduled to appear as a witness at the Jan. 6 committee’s hearing on Tuesday, did have an unfortunate brush with prominence in the weeks after the 2020 election.
With her mother, Ruby Freeman, Ms. Moss worked on Election Day processing ballots in Atlanta for the Fulton County elections board — in a hotly disputed swing state — and found herself ensnared in one of the many conspiracy theories that surrounded the presidential race.
In early December 2020, a lawyer for President Donald J. Trump played a segment of surveillance footage from their vote-counting station for a Georgia Senate committee. The lawyer falsely claimed that the spliced clip showed Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman pulling 18,000 fraudulent ballots from a suitcase and illegally feeding them through voting machines.
The baseless allegation was quickly seized upon by right-wing media outlets like The Gateway Pundit, which wrote several stories about Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman, calling them “crooked Democrats” and claiming that they began counting ballots “without election monitors in the room.”
Although Fulton County and Georgia election officials immediately debunked the accusations, they were nonetheless amplified by top Trump allies like Rudolph W. Giuliani. He compared Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman to drug dealers and called for their homes to be searched during a hearing with Georgia state legislators.
Mr. Trump himself invoked Ms. Freeman’s name 18 times during a phone call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, on Jan. 2, 2021. In the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to help him find 11,800 votes — enough to swing the results in Georgia away from the winner, Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Raffensperger is also scheduled to testify at the House hearing on Tuesday.
When Ms. Moss appears before the committee, she is likely to describe the personal costs of her ordeal, which included death threats and unending harassment by phone and text message. She and Ms. Freeman eventually sued The Gateway Pundit for defamation and brought a separate legal action against Mr. Giuliani and another right-wing media outlet, One America News Network. In April, the network agreed to a settlement with the two women.
An earlier version of this article misstated the date of President Donald J. Trump’s phone call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. It was on Jan. 2, 2021, not Jan. 3.
How we handle corrections
Over nearly an hour, Rusty Bowers, a Republican who is the speaker of the House of Representatives in Arizona, testified on Tuesday in painstaking and emotional detail about the pressure campaign he faced over several weeks after the Nov. 3, 2020, election, in which President Donald J. Trump lost the state.
Mr. Bowers, speaking slowly, also told the House select committee about the harassment he experienced outside his home from Trump supporters in the weeks before Jan. 6, 2021, in which he was called a “pedophile” and other epithets.
Mr. Bowers, who spoke about the Constitution in reverential and spiritual terms, had tears in his eyes as he described his gravely ill daughter enduring some of the harassment outside their house. (She died in late January.)
“It was disturbing,” he said. “It was disturbing.”
The effort to persuade him to take steps to flip the outcome in Arizona to Mr. Trump’s column — the state was won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. — began with pressure from Mr. Trump, and one of his lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, who maintained that he had evidence of fraud. “Aren’t we all Republicans here? I would think we would get a better reception,” Mr. Bowers recalled Mr. Giuliani saying at one point.
Soon after Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona, a Republican, certified the state for Mr. Biden, Mr. Giuliani and an associate, Jenna Ellis, met with Arizona lawmakers, including Mr. Bowers, Mr. Bowers recalled. Mr. Bowers described Ms. Ellis asserting that they had evidence of widespread voter fraud, only to provide none.
“I said, ‘I want the names. Do you have the names of the supposedly dead or fraudulent voters?’” Mr. Bowers said. “She said, ‘Yes.’”
Nothing was produced. Eventually, he recalled, Mr. Giuliani said, “We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have the evidence.”
Mr. Bowers also recalled speaking to Mr. Trump, making clear to the president that he “wouldn’t do anything illegal for him,” as one questioner, Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, said. Nonetheless, another lawyer advising Mr. Trump, John Eastman, called Mr. Bowers in early January and urged him to schedule a legislative vote to “decertify the electors, because we had plenary authority to do so.”
Mr. Eastman, Mr. Bowers testified, said that he should “just do it and let the courts figure it all out.”
Mr. Bowers again rejected the push, saying, “I took an oath — for me to take that, to do what you do would be counter to my oath.”
Finally, he testified, there was a call from another Trump supporter, Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, when the Electoral College vote was to be confirmed by a joint session of Congress. Mr. Biggs, he said, pushed him again to undo the state’s certification of its electors for Mr. Biden.
“We have no legal pathway” to “execute such a request,” Mr. Bowers recalled saying. He also recalled his reaction when he learned that Trump advisers pushed ahead with a scheme to put forward slates of “alternate” electors. “I thought of the book, ‘The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,’” Mr. Bowers said.
Mr. Bowers’s personal journal contained an entry in which he said, “I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.” He was invited to read it into the testimony.
He was also asked for his reaction to a statement from Mr. Trump criticizing Mr. Bowers’s testimony in advance, in which he claimed that Mr. Bowers had told him the election was “rigged” and that he had won the state.
“I did have a conversation with the president,” Mr. Bowers said. “That certainly isn’t it.”
A moment later, more emphatically, he said, “Anywhere, anyone, any time has said that I said the election was rigged — that would not be true.”
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSchiff is working through a number of false claims made by Trump and his team. One of them was Trump’s claim that thousands of dead people voted in Georgia. Raffensperger says that after his office investigated, “we found two dead people,” and later two more. “Not 10,000, not 5,000,” as the Trump team had claimed.
As the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack holds public hearings, a grand jury in Atlanta is continuing to hear evidence in the ongoing criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies over their efforts to disrupt and reverse the 2020 election outcome in Georgia.
Some of the witnesses in the two inquiries overlap. Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, who is appearing before the committee on Tuesday, testified in front of the grand jury in Atlanta this month.
Gabriel Sterling, one of Mr. Raffensperger’s top advisers, is also appearing before the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday, and a Georgia election worker, Shaye Moss, who was the target of a right-wing smear campaign, is expected to testify as well.
Mr. Trump’s call to Mr. Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, figures in both investigations.
“I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Raffensperger during the call, which would have been enough to overturn his loss in the state. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, refused to give Mr. Trump what he wanted, and he and his team faced a barrage of vitriol and death threats from Trump supporters.
Last month, Mr. Raffensperger decisively defeated a primary challenger backed by the former president.
The criminal investigation in Georgia is being led by Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta.
“We’re going to look at anything that impacted the 2020 election in a way that would be criminal,” Ms. Willis said in a recent interview, adding: “One of the fundamental rights of a democracy is that we have free and fair elections. It is literally what makes the United States different from most of the rest of the world.”
Among the potential criminal charges that Ms. Willis is weighing is racketeering, and she is also reviewing the slate of fake electors that Republicans created in a desperate attempt to circumvent the state’s voters.
While there is “no formal coordination” between the House committee’s investigation and her own inquiry, Ms. Willis said, her office is paying attention to the proceedings in Washington. “Obviously, we’re looking at everything that relates to Georgia that that committee is overturning,” she said.
Schiff promised to provide evidence of a direct link between Trump and a scheme to put forward false pro-Trump electors. As evidence, the committee played deposition video from Ronna McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, who testified that Trump personally called her about helping further the scheme. Trump put the conservative lawyer John Eastman on the phone with McDaniel “to talk about the importance of the R.N.C. helping the campaign gather these contingent electors,” she testified.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTGabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state's office in Georgia, says the news conference in which he decried claims of election fraud was prompted by a death threat he viewed on Twitter that featured a GIF of a noose. We wrote about how the hangman’s noose and gallows became a prominent motif in far-right circles in the run-up to Jan. 6.
The Witnesses
Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia who publicly disputed former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, is testifying before the Jan. 6 committee on Tuesday.
Mr. Sterling, along with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, became a vocal defender of Georgia’s election security in the weeks after the election, even as Mr. Trump and members of his campaign sought to discredit the results and to circulate conspiracy theories that the election had been rigged in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr.
In the hearing on Tuesday, the committee is expected to focus on how Mr. Trump and those in his inner circle targeted state officials in their quest to overturn elections results in battleground states that Mr. Biden won narrowly. In Georgia, Mr. Biden’s final margin of victory was fewer than 12,000 votes.
Mr. Sterling helped oversee the implementation of Georgia’s voting systems in 2020, including the electronic equipment produced by Dominion Voting Systems, which became the target of outlandish conspiracy theories perpetuated by the Trump campaign. He also helped organize a painstaking recount of Georgia’s nearly five million votes in order to confirm the state’s election results.
Unlike other state-level officials who did not act on Mr. Trump’s false claims, Mr. Sterling repeatedly spoke out against the falsehoods in prominent fashion.
In fiery news conferences after the election, Mr. Sterling confronted Mr. Trump’s false claims, methodically debunking many of the most widespread falsehoods aimed at the election in Georgia. He also accused Mr. Trump of whipping up public resentment toward election officials in his bid to stay in power, and he criticized the former president for refusing to condemn a wave of violent threats against officials.
On Tuesday, Mr. Sterling is expected to speak about how Mr. Trump and those in his orbit disingenuously accused officials in Georgia of failing to secure the election, even after they repeatedly explained that claims of election fraud or voting irregularities were unfounded.
The Witnesses
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack is hearing testimony on Tuesday from Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, who resisted efforts by former President Donald J. Trump to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in his state.
In a phone call that leaked shortly after the election, Mr. Raffensperger was heard facing off against Mr. Trump and some of his lawyers and advisers, who presented a number of conspiracy theories that they argued could give Mr. Raffensperger reason to invalidate Mr. Biden’s victory in Georgia.
Mr. Raffensperger was heard repeatedly rejecting those arguments, as well as Mr. Trump’s exhortation that he “find” 11,780 votes in Georgia — enough to declare Mr. Trump the winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes.
In the committee’s hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Raffensperger is expected to testify that Mr. Trump had clearly realized before the call that he had lost the election but that he proceeded to try to reverse the results anyway through personal pressure.
The standoff has made Mr. Raffensperger a top political target for Mr. Trump in the years since.
With Mr. Raffensperger up for re-election this year, Mr. Trump was quick to endorse his opponent, Jody Hice, in the Republican primary race in May. Mr. Hice, who represents Georgia’s 10th Congressional District, was among a group of lawmakers who repeated Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, co-signed an amicus brief asking the Supreme Court to consider overturning the election results and met with Mr. Trump at the White House in December 2020 to organize efforts to object to the results during a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Mr. Raffensperger, who campaigned on his record of resisting pressure by the Trump campaign, emerged unscathed this year, defeating Mr. Hice by a margin of nearly 20 points.
Earlier this month, Mr. Raffensperger testified in a grand jury trial about his call with Mr. Trump, part of a separate investigation into the former president’s efforts to overturn the state’s results.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThrough a pair of videos and a state legislator’s testimony, the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack sought in its fourth hearing on Tuesday to convey the severity of the threats that election officials and state legislators faced as a result of President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss.
The first video showed Trump supporters outside the home of Jocelyn Benson, the secretary of state of Michigan, after President Biden’s victory there was called. A man screamed through a megaphone, “You are a tyrant, you are a felon and you must turn yourself in to the authorities immediately!”
“We started to hear the noises outside my home,” Ms. Benson, a Democrat, said in audio accompanying the footage. “And my stomach sunk, and I thought: It’s me.”
She went on, “Are they coming with guns? Are they going to attack my house? I’m in here with my kid, you know. I’m trying to put him to bed. And so it was. That was the scariest moment, just not knowing what was going to happen.”
The second video showed the white nationalist Nick Fuentes addressing viewers in a livestream just days before the Capitol attack.
“We have no leverage,” he said in the livestream. “What are we going to do to them? What can you and I do to a state legislator? Besides kill them? Although we should not do that. I’m not advising that, but, I mean, what else can you do, right?”
That footage was not new. Mr. Fuentes’s comments were reported on when he made them and have since been widely disseminated, as have the many other threats Trump supporters made.
But in a hearing that seeks to illuminate the depths of Mr. Trump’s crusade against state officials who refused to overturn the legitimate results of the election, the footage further underscored the violent nature of a pressure campaign that would culminate in the Jan. 6 riot and permeate mainstream Republican politics.
Rusty Bowers, the Republican speaker of the Arizona House, also testified about the threats he received after refusing to abet the Trump campaign’s efforts to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in Arizona.
His office received tens of thousands of phone messages, texts and emails, to the point that staff members were unable to effectively communicate with one another. More than a year later, Mr. Bowers said, Trump supporters still gather in his neighborhood, blaring videos that call him a pedophile and leaving threatening literature on his property. He also recalled an incident in which a man with a pistol confronted one of his neighbors.
In the first months after the election, “we had a daughter who was gravely ill who was upset by what was happening outside,” he said, his voice catching. His daughter died in January 2021.
Bowers’s searing, emotional testimony describing the threats he endured could be a preview of what is to come for election workers and officials during this year’s midterms. The Justice Department last summer started a task force to address such threats, but it has so far brought only three cases against people over threats to election workers or officials.
Very powerful and personal testimony from Bowers about the intense backlash to his decision not to follow Trump’s demands on the election.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBowers testifies that he was threatened by a man with “three bars on his chest” — the logo of the Three Percenters, a far-right extremist group — in retaliation for upholding the law.
As Bowers watched Trump’s allies pursue their plans to undo the election, he tells the committee that he thought: “This is a tragic parody.”
In another new revelation implicating Republican members of Congress, the committee shows texts from an aide to Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, to a Pence aide indicating that Johnson on Jan. 6 wanted to hand deliver a slate of fake electors from Wisconsin to the vice president. Pence’s aide responded: “Do not give that to him.”
The committee points out that the ballots representing the fake slates of electors had no legal effect. That said, it’s illegal to submit false documents to the federal government, so there could be consequences for creating and submitting those slates.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOur colleagues Reid Epstein and Nick Corasaniti recently reported on how in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, Republican voters have elevated candidates who owe their political rise to their amplification of doubts about Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory for posts that will have significant sway over the 2024 presidential election.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the House committee investigating the attack on the Capitol, is playing a key role in Tuesday’s hearing by leading the questioning of state officials who are testifying.
In his opening statement, Mr. Schiff said a pressure campaign against state officials coordinated by President Donald J. Trump and his team was “a dangerous precursor to the violence we saw on Jan. 6.”
Here is an excerpt from Mr. Schiff’s remarks:
The president’s lie was — and is — a dangerous cancer on the body politic. If you can convince Americans that they cannot trust their own elections, that anytime they lose, it is somehow illegitimate, then what is left but violence to determine who should govern?
This brings us to the focus of today’s hearing. When state elections officials refused to stop the count, Donald Trump and his campaign tried to put pressure on them. When state executive officials refused to certify him the winner of states he lost, he applied more pressure. When state legislators refused to go back into session and appoint Trump electors, he amped up the pressure yet again. Anyone who got in the way of Donald Trump’s continued hold on power after he lost the election was the subject of a dangerous and escalating campaign of pressure.
This pressure campaign brought angry phone calls and texts, armed protests, intimidation, and, all too often, threats of violence and death. State legislators were singled out. So too were statewide elections officials. Even local elections workers, diligently doing their jobs, were accused of being criminals, and had their lives turned upside down.
In a new detail underscoring how Republican members of Congress close to Trump joined his pressure campaign, Bowers testifies that Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, called him on the morning of Jan. 6 and asked him to support the effort to overturn the election. Bowers says he told Biggs he would not.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBowers says that Giuliani told him, “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.” He speculates that Giuliani’s utterance may have been a gaffe, but it could still be taken as an admission that Trump’s allies knew they didn’t have evidence to support their election fraud claims.
As Republican officials who stood up to Trump testify before the committee, a recurring theme has become how they leaned on their faith as they pushed back against Trump’s pressure campaign. Greg Jacob, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief counsel, testified that Pence and his team began and ended Jan. 6 with a prayer. And Bowers just now grew emotional as he explained why he would not brook the Trump campaign’s efforts to get him to overturn the election: “It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired of my most basic foundational beliefs. And so for me to do that because somebody just asked me to is foreign to my very being. I will not do it.”
Bowers testifies that Trump asked him to hold a hearing at the Arizona State Capitol to investigate the allegations of election fraud. Bowers says he did not believe that the evidence “merited a hearing, and I did not want to be used as a pawn.” Bowers adds that he later told Trump, “You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath.”
The committee has made much of the fact that its witnesses are Republicans who wanted Trump to win. It underscores the reality that — no matter how much Democrats revile Trump — Republicans will ultimately decide whether he remains a force in American politics.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTSchiff just read Bowers a statement Trump released to undermine Bowers ahead of his testimony, in which the former president claimed Bowers had said the election was “rigged.” “That would not be true,” Bowers said.
The first witness at today’s hearing is Rusty Bowers, a Republican who is the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. The committee is again relying mainly on testimony from Republicans, a tactic that lawmakers believe considerably strengthens the witnesses’ credibility.
Underscoring how the pressure campaign against election officials came directly from the Trump campaign, the committee played audio of Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, two of Trump’s lawyers, calling state legislators and seemingly reading off the same script urging them to overturn the election.
The Witnesses
The speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, Rusty Bowers, who was the focus of an intense pressure campaign by President Donald J. Trump’s allies after the 2020 election, will tell his story publicly for the first time at the Jan. 6 hearing on Tuesday.
Parts of Mr. Bowers’s experience have been revealed previously: Mr. Trump and Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, called Mr. Bowers as part of their efforts to undo Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
Mr. Bowers, a Republican, resisted that pressure, as well as efforts from another Trump ally to enlist him in a scheme to reject the certification of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021.
In his testimony before the House committee investigating the Capitol attack, Mr. Bowers is expected to lay out details of the pressure he faced as well as of the threats that his family endured because he would not go along with what was asked of him.
Ahead of Mr. Bowers’s appearance, Mr. Trump issued a statement trying to undermine the lawmaker before he testified.
Mr. Bowers, who has said he voted for Mr. Trump, comes from a state that was called for Mr. Biden on election night by Fox News and, a few hours later, by The Associated Press. That the state was declared for Mr. Biden infuriated Mr. Trump’s aides.
This year, Mr. Bowers was given the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his handling of the pressure campaign. Other recipients included Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the Jan. 6 committee, and Shaye Moss, an election worker in Georgia who is also scheduled to testify before the panel on Tuesday.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe committee is outlining how the Trump campaign and Trump himself laid the groundwork for his followers to directly target state election officials, even sharing their personal cellphone numbers on social media and encouraging people to call them. One Michigan Republican told the committee that he received “just shy of 4,000 text messages in a short period of time” after the Trump campaign posted his number online.
To the extent the committee is trying to grab the Justice Department by the lapels and force it to act, this hearing demonstrates the harm to people from what Trump and his allies were pushing.
Schiff mentions the increasing threats against election officials. An election bill taking shape in the Senate would increase penalties for violence and threats aimed at poll workers and election officials. Supporters would like to see it pass before this year’s midterms in November.
Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, will take the lead in questioning at this hearing, continuing the practice of allowing one lawmaker to try to steer the hearing narrative in contrast to typical congressional hearings where all lawmakers get a chance. It has proved very effective so far, keeping the hearings more focused.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTRepresentative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice chairwoman, condemns the increase in “thug violence,” as people face threats to their personal safety for not going along with demands made by political actors.
The committee is playing testimony from William P. Barr, Trump’s attorney general. He was adamant that all of the allegations in Georgia had been looked at and dismissed.
The Committee
For Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, a spot on the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot is his latest prominent role in a high-profile congressional investigation of former President Donald J. Trump.
As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he steered the 2019 impeachment inquiry into whether Mr. Trump abused his office by attempting to withhold aid to Ukraine in exchange for an investigation into Joseph R. Biden Jr., a rival for the presidency.
Mr. Schiff, a former prosecutor, went on to lead the Democratic case before the Senate as the lead impeachment manager for Mr. Trump’s first trial in 2020. And on Thursday, he will again play a prominent role walking Americans through a complicated series of events that led to a historic second impeachment after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol in a bid to stop Congress’s official count to finalize the election.
On Thursday, Mr. Schiff said the committee hoped “to tell that story in a very coherent way,” using the evidence investigators have gathered to walk viewers and their colleagues through the events that preceded the violence at the Capitol, as well as on Jan. 6. He said his work this time around was less constrained than the impeachment trial, because witnesses were not allowed in that proceeding.
A strait-laced and reserved lawmaker, Mr. Schiff’s turns in the spotlight as a top investigator into the Trump administration have also made him a favorite foil for Republicans. If Republicans reclaim control of the House in November, he is expected to become one of their top targets as they launch their own investigations.
“What I’m most concerned about if the Republicans should ever get near the gavel is that they will overturn the next election if Trump loses again — they tried to overturn the last one,” Mr. Schiff said earlier this year, after the committee subpoenaed Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, and other Republicans as part of the investigation. He added, “that’s the far greater danger — they have proven themselves so recklessly irresponsible.”
Mr. Schiff was first elected to the House in 2000 after a few years in the California Senate, and began climbing the ranks of seniority. He has become a close ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, and accompanied her on a secret trip to Kyiv earlier this year.