Two top aides to former President Donald Trump testified before the January 6 committee that he admitted losing the 2020 election while continuing to speak out against and working on changing the results.
During the ninth hearing, which may be the final one, the January 6 Committee investigating the incident at the U.S. Capitol heard testimony from former White House aide Alyssa Farah. She said that a week after the election was called for now-President Joe Biden, Trump was watching Biden on television in the Oval Office. She said he said, “Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?”
During another testimony, Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, said that Trump said to Meadows, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out.”
The committee continued to try to build the case that former President Trump attempted to change the election’s outcome, even though he knew and believed he had lost. One of the two Republicans on the committee, Adam Kinzinger, pointed to Trump’s actions in his final weeks in office saying, “President Trump rushed to complete his unfinished business.”
Kinzinger said Trump’s actions had a sense of reckless urgency, pointing out the example of an order calling for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Somalia and Afghanistan. Trump signed the order on November 11, meaning troops would have been withdrawn rapidly before Biden took office on January 20.
General Keith Kellogg, the former president’s acting national security adviser, testified the results would have been “catastrophic” and said, “it would have been a debacle.”
Kinzinger agreed, saying, “These are the highly consequential actions for a president who knows his term will shortly end.”
Committee subpoenas Trump
The House select committee publicly voted to subpoena Trump, continuing to seek information about the former president’s possible involvement in the January 6 breech of the Capitol.
Trump responded to the subpoena by issuing a letter to Democrat Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, select committee chairman. In the letter, Trump called committee members “highly partisan political Hacks and Thugs whose sole function is to destroy the lives of many hard-working American Patriots whose records in life have been unblemished until this point of attempted ruination” and called the January 6 investigation a “Charade and Witch Hunt.”
The former president then urged committee members and Thompson to examine the “massive Election Fraud” that he insists took place during the presidential election of 2020. Trump also defended his actions before and during the January 6 incident, which the committee scrutinized during the October 13 hearing. Trump said the committee “willfully ignored” that he had recommended and authorized troops numbering in the thousands to be deployed to the Capitol before January 6, because he “knew, just based on instinct and what [he] was hearing, that the crowd coming to listen to [his] speech, and various others, would be a very big one, far bigger than anyone thought possible.”
In the letter, Trump blamed D.C. Democrat Mayor Muriel Bowser and Democrat Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the hours-long delay in deploying the National Guard to the Capitol on January 6. He argued that “troops were ready to go” and that he “did [his] job long ahead of schedule.”
In the close of his letter, Trump praised the “great American Patriots” present at the Capitol that day and said they “have had their lives ruined” by the committee.
Recent polls have demonstrated that American voters believe “threats to democracy” is the country’s most critical issue.
