Hi! This is Lexie of Read by AI. I read human-curated content for you to listen to while working, exercising, commuting, or any other time. Without further ado: The 1/6 Committee’s Biggest Challenge: Assessing Whether Trump Is Bonkers by David Corn from Mother Jones.
One key mission for the House committee investigating the January 6 riot is affirming reality and highlighting the obvious: The 2020 election was not rigged to steal victory from Donald Trump. The committee’s hearings that began last week and continue until next week are unlikely to persuade Trump cultists that Trump’s Big Lie is a big lie. But there is great value in showing reality-based Americans a full and coherent picture of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, which led to the insurrectionist riot at the Capitol. Even though Trump’s sham crusade—which has been embraced by the Republican Party, the conservative movement, and right-wing media—is predicated on bogus and disproven claims, it deserves an official pushback, and the January 6 committee focused on that task during its hearing on Monday. In doing so, the committee raised a significant question: Is Trump bonkers?
The opening night of the hearings and Monday’s session presented clear and compelling evidence that Trump’s inner circle knew there was nothing fraudulent or fishy about the election and that this was repeatedly conveyed to Trump. Before Election Day, Trump had been told by his advisers that mail-in ballots, which likely favored Democrat Joe Biden, would be counted later in the day and could shift the results in swing states—that is, this would not be fraud. On election night, Bill Stepien, the longtime GOP operative who managed Trump’s campaign, and other campaign aides concluded that the final count would likely require several days of tabulation. They urged Trump to not declare victory or allege the election was being stolen from him. But an allegedly inebriated Rudy Giuliani, who was at the White House that evening, counseled Trump to do both. Whether or not Trump needed to be egged on by Giuliani—he had for months been claiming that he could only lose through fraud—he followed his lubricated lawyer’s advice. He asserted massive fraud had robbed him of victory, and millions of his cultists believed him. A dangerous disinformation campaign was launched.
In subsequent weeks, Trump aides and advisers repeatedly concluded that there was no evidence of electoral theft. The committee played several clips of onetime Attorney General Bill Barr calling Trump’s allegations “bullshit” and “nonsense.” Yet in this time period, the Trump camp divided into what Stepien called “Team Normal” (the Trumpers who adhered to reality) and the squad led by Giuliani and attorney Sidney Powell that spread convoluted conspiracy theories involving Venezuela, supposed German vote-harvesting farms, rigged voting machines, and other craziness. The normies included Matt Morgan, the campaign’s top lawyer, whose team of attorneys searched and found no significant fraud. Referring to the Giuliani and Powell, Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, told the committee, “What they were proposing…was nuts.”
The committee outlined numerous instances in which Trump was informed a specific allegation of fraud was bunk. Barr noted his own frustration with Trump repeatedly citing one spurious charge after another. He described to the committee a meeting he had at the White House on November 23, 2020. Trump insisted that there had been major fraud and that as soon as this would be revealed, the results of the election would be reversed. Barr told him that the fraud allegations were “not panning out.” As Barr left the meeting, he asked White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Jared Kushner how long Trump was going to “carry on with this stolen election stuff.” Meadows said that Trump was becoming “more realistic” and recognized the limits of how far he could push these claims. Kushner told Barr,
