The House committee investigating the Capitol attack will also underscore the vitriol and suffering that election workers endured because of President Donald J. Trump’s lies.
WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol on Tuesday plans to detail President Donald J. Trump’s personal involvement in a pressure campaign on state officials to subvert the will of the voters as well as an audacious scheme to put forward false slates of electors in seven states to keep him in power.
At its fourth hearing this month, scheduled for 1 p.m., the committee will seek to demonstrate what has been a repeated point of emphasis for the panel: that Mr. Trump knew — or should have known — that his lies about a stolen election, and the plans he pursued to stay in office, were wrong, but that he pushed ahead with them anyway.
The committee also plans to highlight, in potentially emotional testimony, the vitriol and the death threats that election workers endured because of Mr. Trump’s lies.
“We will show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a member of the panel, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“We will also again show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme,” he continued. “And we will show courageous state officials who stood up and said they wouldn’t go along with this plan to either call legislatures back into session or decertify the results for Joe Biden.”
Mr. Schiff, who will play a key role in Tuesday’s hearing, told The Los Angeles Times that the panel would release new information about the deep involvement of Mark Meadows, Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff. Among that evidence, Mr. Schiff said, will be text messages revealing that Mr. Meadows wanted to send autographed “Make America Great Again” hats to people conducting an audit of the Georgia election.
The hearing’s first witness will be Rusty Bowers, a Republican who is the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives. Mr. Bowers withstood pressure to overturn his state’s election from Mr. Trump; Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer; and even Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas.
Mr. Bowers will describe the pressure campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies, according to a committee aide. He will also describe the harassment he endured before and after Jan. 6, and its impact on his family, the aide said.
The panel will then hear testimony from Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, and Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer for the secretary of state’s office, who were pressed to overturn their state’s election results. In a phone call, Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to put the state in his column and vaguely threatened him with “a criminal offense.”
Finally, the committee will hear from Shaye Moss, a Georgia election worker who was the target of a right-wing smear campaign.
Ms. Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, both of whom processed ballots in Atlanta during the 2020 election for the Fulton County elections board, filed a defamation lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing conspiratorial website that published dozens of false stories about them. The stories described the two women as “crooked Democrats” and claimed that they “pulled out suitcases full of ballots and began counting those ballots without election monitors in the room.”
Ms. Moss and Ms. Freeman also sued Mr. Giuliani, saying that he “bears substantial and outsized responsibility for the campaign of partisan character assassination” that they faced.
Investigations conducted by the Georgia secretary of state’s office found no wrongdoing by the two women.
The pressure campaign on state officials came as the Trump campaign was organizing false slates of electors in seven swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. The committee and federal prosecutors have been investigating how those slates were used by Mr. Trump’s allies in an attempt to disrupt the normal workings of Congress’s certification of the Electoral College votes on Jan. 6.
The fourth hearing comes as the committee continues to build its case against Mr. Trump, laying out evidence of how he spread lies about the election results, then raised hundreds of millions of dollars off those lies, and how he tried to stay in office by pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to reject legitimate electoral votes.
A fifth hearing planned for Thursday will dig into Mr. Trump’s attempts to intervene into the workings of the Justice Department, including exploring the possibility of firing the acting attorney general for not going along with his plans.
The committee is continuing to gather evidence as it holds its hearings. The panel recently sent a letter to Ms. Thomas, who goes by the nickname of Ginni, asking to interview her about her communications with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who advised Mr. Trump on how to overturn the election, and later unsuccessfully sought a pardon.
“We believe you may have information concerning John Eastman’s plans and activities relevant to our investigation,” the panel wrote to Ms. Thomas in a letter obtained by The New York Times.
As the committee explores how Mr. Trump’s lies sparked death threats against election workers, one member of the panel revealed on Sunday some of the vitriol he had endured. The lawmaker, Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, posted to Twitter a letter that threatened the murder of his family.
“This threat that came in, it was mailed to my house,” Mr. Kinzinger said on ABC’s “This Week,” adding: “We got it a couple of days ago and it threatens to execute me, as well as my wife and 5-month-old child. We’ve never seen or had anything like that.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
