Former US President Donald Trump ignored his top advisers, including his daughter, who advised him to stop claiming Democrats stole the 2020 election results, the Congressional Investigation Committee on the 2020 election said Monday.

“Even before the election, Trump decided that regardless of the facts and the truth, if he loses the election, he will say that it was rigged,” said Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from this group, which seeks to clarify the responsibility of the Republican billionaire in the attack on the US Congress. , united by their supporters on January 6, 2021.

Donald Trump said the 2020 US election was stolen – Photo: Reproduction / YouTube / ND

The 76-year-old former president reacted in the evening, calling the investigation a “disregard for justice” in a 12-page letter in which he also confirmed his false accusations of fraud in the 2020 election.

The Democratic-led group “seeks to distract the American people,” he wrote. “The truth is that on January 6, 2021, Americans showed up in Washington D.C. in large numbers to hold their elected officials accountable for clear signs of criminal activity throughout the election,” he added, despite the arsenal of evidence. indicating the opposite. . . .

In the second of a series of hearings after nearly a year of investigation, the commission showed video evidence of the former president’s maneuvers between presidential election night and the storming of the Capitol.

Giuliani “drunk”

An hour after the polls closed on November 3, 2020, Joe Biden and Donald Trump were tied.

“It has become increasingly clear that the election will not be decided tonight,” Ivanka Trump, the former president’s daughter and one of his top advisers at the time, said in a testimony released Monday by the commission.

However, shortly before 2:30 a.m. local time, Donald Trump made a statement on White House television. “We won the election,” he assured, before the vote count was completed.

One of the few who urged the president to speak out publicly was his private lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who was “apparently drunk” according to one of the president’s aides.

Trump is angry

On November 7, 2020, shortly before 11:30 a.m., Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election. On the same day, the head of the Donald Trump campaign headquarters attended a meeting with the outgoing president.

“We told him what his chances of winning at that moment were, that he had maybe a 5 or 10% chance,” Bill Stepien recalled.

However, according to Stepien, these statements increasingly angered Trump, who decided to change his team and surround himself with people who supported him at all costs.

On November 19, this new team of lawyers held a press conference in which Sidney Powell, one of Trump’s lawyers, accused Venezuela, Cuba, and the Democrats of preparing a campaign plot.

For his part, Rudy Giuliani denounced the “scandalous iron curtain of censorship.”

“Disconnected from Reality”

Four days later, Attorney General Bill Barr traveled to the White House to investigate alleged election fraud presented by Donald Trump several times.

“It demoralized me because I thought, ‘This is crazy, if he really believes all this, then he is really out of touch with reality,’” Bill Barr, who retired on December 14, said.

The following month, Donald Trump and his staff continued to defend “these lies” about election fraud to raise money, the commission concluded.

Trump’s campaign team bombarded his supporters with dozens of messages and raised $250 million between Election Day and January 6, 2021, he said.

“The big lie was also a big hoax,” said Lofgren, who is known for working on congressional indictments of three presidents: Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

The so-called “January 6th” panel, made up of seven Democrats and two Republicans, will continue to present its findings on the investigation, according to which the former president was planning a “coup attempt.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland said he was following “all hearings” of the commission and vowed to bring to justice all those involved in the events of January 6, 2021, “regardless of their rank, position, or whether they were present” at the attack. to Congress.