Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign manager will appear as a witness Monday before the House committee investigating.
The attack on the US Capitol, as it seeks to establish links between the rioters and the former president’s inner circle.
Bill Stepien is among five witnesses listed by the committee for its next meeting. On political talk shows Sunday, committee members said Trump knew that his claims of a stolen election were false but used them to incite the Jan. 6, 2021 mob anyway.
“This has been a clear focus of our investigative efforts,” Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat on the committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks, said on ABC’s “This Week.” “There are connections between these white nationalist groups and some in Trump’s orbit.”
Schiff said last Thursday’s prime-time committee hearing provided “a good sample” of the committee’s evidence, but “there’s a lot more testimony where that came from.”
The hearings resume Monday at 10 a.m. with a daytime session scheduled for Wednesday and possibly another day this week.
Thursday’s hearing included excerpts from videotaped testimony by former Attorney General William Barr saying he told the president his claims of widespread voter fraud were “bull—-” as well as Trump’s daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump saying she believed Barr at the time.
“I don’t want to go into the evidence that we haven’t put out yet,” Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, a Republican committee member, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Let me tell you my belief that I can say right now, the president absolutely tried to overthrow the will of the people and he tried to do it initially through misinformation.”
Trump maintains that the investigation is a politically motivated “witch hunt” designed to divert attention from what he calls the failures of the Biden administration.
Stepien supervised the Trump campaign’s shift “to an effort focused on ‘Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fundraising” after the 2020 election, committee chair Representative Bennie Thompson said in a Nov. 8 subpoena letter.
Also on Monday’s witness list are Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor, election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, former Philadelphia city commissioner Al Schmidt, and BJay Pak, who resigned as US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia in January.
Proving that Trump knew his claims of a stolen election were false could establish grounds for a criminal case by showing he had criminal intent, Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who is also on the committee, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I think we can prove to any reasonable, open-minded person that Donald Trump absolutely knew, because he was surrounded by lawyers, including the attorney general of the United States, William Barr, telling him in no uncertain terms, in terms that Donald Trump could understand, this is B.S.,” Raskin said.
The Democrats also hinted at frustration that the Justice Department hasn’t been more aggressive in prosecuting those who encouraged the mob.
“There are certain actions, parts of these different lines of effort to overturn the election, that I don’t see evidence the Justice Department is investigating,” Schiff said.
But Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, told “Fox News Sunday” the committee has “a long way to go before they could establish” that the former president has criminal liability for the storming of the Capitol, even though Trump “has a responsibility there.”