Former President was ‘detached from reality’ after the 2020 election and used his ‘big lie’ about fraud to fundraise millions of dollars, according to the committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot.
In its second public hearing on Monday, the House Select Committee used video testimonies to convey that Trump was repeatedly told that his claims of election fraud were unfounded. However, Trump continued to push the idea.
Speaking to committee members, former Attorney General William Barr said he told Trump that his election fraud claims were baseless, but there was ‘never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are’. Barr raised the possibility that Trump actually began believing his own lies.
‘I thought, “Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, with – he’s become detached from reality, if he really believes this stuff,”‘ Barr said in a clip of his testimony played on Monday.
Committee member Zoe Lofgren said the panel would show ‘that the Trump campaign used these false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts’.
A senior investigative counsel for the committee, Amanda Wick, said that Trump supporters got as many as 25 emails daily asking them to donate to a nonexistent election defense fund.
‘The Trump campaign knew that these claims of voter fraud were false yet they continued to barrage small-dollar donors with emails encouraging them to donate to something called the “Official Election Defense Fund,”’ Wick said during the hearing. ‘The select committee discovered no such fund existed.’
And in a recorded deposition, former Trump campaign staffer Hanna Allred said, ‘I don’t believe there is actually a fund called the Election Defense Fund.’
The Trump campaign’s digital director called the fund a ‘marketing tactic’.
A notable amount of the money donated to the fund was routed to the Save America PAC, which was created two days after the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, according to Wick. The political action committee then sent $5million to the company that organized the January 6 rally before the riot, $1million to two separate organizations linked to Trump staff members and $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection.
‘Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,’ Lofgren said.
‘So not only was there that big lie, there was the big rip-off. Donors deserve to know where their funds are really going. They deserve better than what President Trump and his team did.’
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