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Rep. Adam Schiff said Tuesday that former President Trump and his inner circle likely violated ‘multiple federal laws’ in their ‘pressure campaign’ to convince states to individually recount or overturn their election results – including Georgia and Arizona.
The committee is hearing from officials in those states during day four of the publicly televised Jan. 6 hearings.
The televised proceedings featured live testimony from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his office’s Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and former Georgia election worker Wandrea ArShaye ‘Shaye’ Moss.
Bowers says Trump and Giuliani pressured him to hold a legislative hearing to investigate voter fraud, but never presented him with the evidence they found
Bowers was first up to the microphone, where he dispelled former President Trump’s statement criticizing him released just ahead of the hearing.
‘Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers is the latest RINO to play along with the Unselect Committee,’ Trump wrote in an emailed statement just ahead of the hearing’s 1 p.m. start time.
‘In November 2020, Bowers thanked me for getting him elected. He said he would have lost, and in fact expected to lose, if I hadn’t come along. During the conversation, he told me that the election was rigged and that I won Arizona,’ Trump continued.
‘He said he got more votes than I did which could never have happened. In fact, he said without me, he would have been out of office, and he expected to be prior to my coming along, and big Arizona rallies. The night before the election he walked outside with his wife and saw the tremendous Trump enthusiasm and told her, ‘You know what? Maybe I will win after all’—and he did. Bowers should hope there’s not a tape of the conversation.’
Bowers said he did speak to the president, but he never said that it was ‘not true’ that he ever said the election was rigged or told the president that he won Arizona.
Bowers also said that he received a call from the former president’s former personal attorney Rudy Giuliani shortly after the election telling him they had evidence that hundreds of thousands votes had been cast from illegal immigrants and thousands of ballots had been turned in from dead people.
‘I asked, ‘Do you have names?’ he said ‘yes.’ I said, ‘Can you give them to me? He said ‘yes.’ Trump then interrupted and said ‘Give the man what he needs, Rudy.”
Bowers said Giuliani never did send him the evidence. He said that after repeatedly pressing the former New York mayor for evidence, Giuliani told him: ‘We’ve got lots of theories we just don’t have the evidence.’
‘I don’t know if that was a gaffe or he didn’t think through what he said,’ Bowers said.
Bowers then said that Trump and Giuliani asked him to convene a formal legislative hearing to present evidence of fraud and work toward replacing President Biden’s electors.
‘You are asking me to do something that’s counter to my oath,’ Bowers said he told Trump. ‘You are asking me to do something against my oath, and I will not break my oath.’
‘I didn’t want to be used as a pawn,’ he added.
Of the whole election fraud scheme, Bowers said: ‘I thought of the book ‘The Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight’. I just thought, this is a tragic parody.’
Bowers also said that attorney John Eastman pressured him to decertify Biden’s electors, as did Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., on Jan. 6.
‘I said, ‘What would you have me do?’ Bowers said of his phone call with Eastman.’ He said, ‘Just do it and let the court sort it out.’
Bowers said that after Trump doxxed him by publicly blasting out his personal phone number, he received in excess of 20,000 emails, 10s of 1000s of phone calls and texts making it impossible to work.
To this day, Bowers said, on Saturdays he gets protesters threatening him at his home.
Meadows’ aide says alternate electors scheme ‘not legally sound,’ Eastman pushes forward
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, also testified that she was in the room with Meadows, Giuliani and others when the White House counsel’s office told them that the scheme to appoint alternate electors was ‘not legally sound.’
An email from Eastman displayed by the committee showed that nevertheless he insisted former Vice President Mike Pence certify the election in favor of Trump.
‘The fact that we have multiple slates of electors demonstrates the uncertainty of either,’ he wrote in an email. ‘Better for [Pence] to act boldly and be challenged.’
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., also wanted to hand-deliver false slates of pro-Trump electors from Wisconsin and Michigan to Pence on the House floor, according to text messages to Pence’s staff revealed by the committee.
The panel then played unseen footage of Jacob Chansley, known as the QAnon Shaman, breaching the Arizona House in December 2020. Bowers testified that Chansley and others were taunting him by name.
The panel then played unseen footage of Jacob Chansley, known as the QAnon Shaman, breaching the Arizona House in December 2020. Bowers testified that Chansley and others were taunting him by name
‘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,’ Schiff, D-Calif., claimed.
‘As we will show, the president’s supporters heard the former president’s claims of fraud and the false allegations he made against state and local officials as a call to action.’
Meanwhile Jan. 6 committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney backed up Schiff’s claims that Trump should be held criminally responsible. ‘Each of these efforts to overturn the election is independently serious. Each deserves attention both by Congress and by the Department of Justice,’ she said.
‘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,’ Rep. Adam Schiff claimed
Arizona state House speaker Rusty Bowers, left, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, center, and chief operating officer for the Georgia secretary of state Gabriel Sterling ahead of the hearing
Bill Barr says he told Trump his fraud election fraud claims in Georgia were ‘bulls***’
The committee also replayed footage from former Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony where admitted that Donald Trump’s allegations that there was funny business in the vote count in Fulton County, Georgia had ‘no merit.’
‘I told him that the stuff that his people were shoveling out to the public was bulls***. I mean that the claims of raud were bull***,’ he said in pre-recorded testimony with January 6 investigators played at the fourth public hearing on Tuesday.
In a separate part of the interview, Barr said ‘Based on our review of it, including interviews of the key witnesses, the Fulton County allegations had no merit.’
‘The ballots under the table were legitimate ballots, they weren’t in a suitcase, they had been pre-opened for eventually feeding into the machine,’ Barr added.
The committee then played footage of Sterling warning Trump of his fraud insistence: ‘Someone’s gonna get shot. Someone’s gonna get killed. And it’s not right.’
Raffensperger told the committee he asserted to Trump that he had the right to a recount of the votes.
GA Sec. of State COO Sterling says that Trump’s legal team knew his ‘suitcase’ theory was untrue
Sterling then said that claims from the Trump team that election workers were pulling and scanning ‘thousands of ballots’ from suitcases, proving fraud, were untrue. Trump had fixated on the ‘suitcase’ theory at the time.
Video was played which Sterling said showed that the workers were engaged in ‘normal ballot processing.’
‘What you saw…the ‘secret suitcases’ with ‘magic ballots,’ were actually ballots that had been packed into those absentee ballot carriers by the workers in plain view of the monitors and the press.’
‘They knew it was untrue,’ Sterling said of Trump’s legal team.
‘The problem you have is it gets to people’s hearts,’ Sterling said. ‘Once you get to the heart, facts don’t matter as much.’
Raffensperger says it was solely Trump’s fault he lost in Georgia
Raffensperger then laid out why Trump actually came up short in Georgia – saying that many Georgians skipped the presidential race and voted in down ballot races for Republican.
‘What happened in the fall of 2020 is that 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential race and yet they voted down ballot in other races. And the Republican congressman ended up getting 43,000 more votes than President Trump. That’s what happened,’ Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger took center stage in the hearing Tuesday as he was one of the GOP targets of the Trump team’s efforts to get red states to name ‘fake electors’ to derail Biden’s Electoral College victory. Trump also infamously called Raffensperger on January 2, 2021 – just days before the Capitol riot and election certification – to pressure him to ‘find 11,780 votes’ to help him overcome Biden’s lead in the Peach State. The committee replayed the phone call during the hearing.
‘There were no votes to find,’ Raffensperger said.
Raffensperger told the committee he asserted to Trump that he had the right to a recount of the votes. ‘
‘Three counts, all remarkably close, which showed that President Trump did come up short.’
The former president sought to retaliate against Raffensperger by backing Georgia Republican Representative Jody Hice in the primary race against him for secretary of state this year – but Raffensperger easily overcame the challenge.
Bowers also received a call in late November 2020 from Trump and his attorney at the time Rudy Giuliani where they informed him that Arizona had a new law that would allow its legislature to pick which presidential electors it wanted to send to Congress for certification, according to the Arizona Republic.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (pictured May 24, 2022) will take center stage at the January 6 select committee’s fourth public hearing on Tuesday afternoon to prove the pressure Donald Trump put on GOP state officials in his ‘plot’ to overturn the 2020 election
The panel’s Tuesday hearing will focus on Trump’s attempts to get contested states to appoint their own electors and to have Vice President Mike Pence accept those votes over the Electoral College results
The GOP Arizona lawmaker, who is a Trump supporter, told the paper that he asked for proof of this law he never heard of, but never received it.
Bowers was also pressured by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni Thomas, who is a conservative activist, to decertify Biden’s victory in the state.
Panel member Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, will lead Thursday’s proceedings.
Excerpts from his opening statement show that the panel will seek to prove that ‘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,’ he will say. ‘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.’
‘As we will show, the president’s supporters heard the former president’s claims of fraud, and the false allegations he made against state and local officials, as a call to action.’
Both Arizona and Georgia are swing states that flipped from red for Trump in 2016 to blue for Joe Biden in 2020. Biden, however, only won those states by extremely slim margins – 0.4 percent in Arizona and 0.3 percent in Georgia.
The small victory margins led Trump, in part, to claim that the election was rigged and stolen by a Democratic plot to deploy thousands of fake mail-in ballots to get Biden to win the swing states that launched him to the presidency in 2016.
Tuesday’s witness Moss, along with her mother Ruby Freeman, were accused by Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani of ‘rigging’ the presidential election count in Georgia. The two, according to Trump and his allies, allegedly brought in ‘suitcases’ full of ballots for Biden.
Trump (pictured June 17, 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee) infamously called Raffensperger on January 2, 2021 to pressure him to ‘find 11,780 votes’ to help him overcome Biden’s lead in Georgia
The former Georgia election official and her mother are now suing Giuliani in federal court after receiving death threats when Trump publicly named them and following an investigation in the state that found no wrongdoing by the pair.
The Democratic-led panel’s focus on Tuesday follows three other hearings this month that centered on proving Trump was aware that he lost the 2020 presidential election but still pushed the ‘Big Lie’ that he was the victor, as well as the pressure campaign on Pence to stop Congress from certifying the Electoral College results.
Pence’s refusal to give into Trump’s plot for him to deny the results from Congress and accept the alternative electors on January 6, 2021 stopped the former president from declaring victory in an election he lost.
After Tuesday’s hearing there could be as many as four more as the select committee aims to quickly finish its case against Trump before the 2022 midterm elections, which is likely to see the House flip red.
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