The House Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol will hear testimony from former Trump campaign manager William Stepien and four other witnesses on Monday in a follow-up to last week’s prime-time TV debut.
The committee confirmed the witness lineup Sunday, which also includes BJay Pak, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia; Al Schmidt, former Philadelphia city commissioner; Chris Stirewalt, former Fox News political editor; and election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg.
Committee aides said Sunday that Monday’s hearing focuses on former President Trump’s decision to claim victory on election night in November 2020 “despite sound advice that he didn’t have the numbers to win,” and his decision to “embrace false claims that the election was tainted by widespread fraud” in the days following the election.
The panel said it will also aim to show how Mr. Trump used the claims of election fraud to drive fundraising efforts.
“We’re going to hear testimony from government officials who were the ones who looked for that fraud, and about how the effort to uncover these baseless allegations have bore no fruit,” the aides said. “We will show that some of those individuals responsible for the violence on the 6th echoed back those very same lies that the former president peddled in the run up to the insurrection.”
The committee subpoenaed Mr. Stepien in November alleging that he “supervised the conversion of the Trump presidential campaign to an effort focused on the ’Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fundraising.”
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The panel also alleges that, under Mr. Stepien’s guidance, the Trump campaign “urged state and party officials” to delay the certification of the November 2020 Presidential Election.
Mr. Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign team came into focus during last week’s prime-time hearing when the panel featured a clip of campaign spokesman Jason Miller’s videotaped deposition in which Mr. Miller appeared to testify that the campaign’s data expert Matt Oczkowski told Mr. Trump on a call that he was going to lose the election.
Mr. Miller tweeted during the hearing that the panel took the clip of the testimony out of context, and said he told the committee in the same deposition that he thought it was “safe to say that [Mr. Trump] disagreed with Matt’s analysis.”
Mr. Pak resigned from his U.S. Attorney post unexpectedly on Jan. 4, 2021, after the release of a call between Mr. Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and other Georgia election officials during which Mr. Trump said “I just want to find 11,780 votes” in his favor in the state.
Mr. Pak reportedly testified in a closed-door Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in August 2021 that Mr. Trump intended to fire him for refusing to back his claims of election fraud in Georgia.
Mr. Ginsberg is a Republican election attorney who served as national counsel to the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in both 2000 and 2004 and was central to the 2000 Florida recount case.
He has been critical of Mr. Trump’s claims of fraud in the 2020 election.
Mr. Stirewalt was on the team at Fox News that called Arizona for candidate Joseph R. Biden on election night. Mr. Trump pushed back on that decision, saying it was made prematurely.
Mr. Stirewalt left Fox News in January of last year and is now a political editor at NewsNation.
Mr. Schmidt defended Philadelphia’s vote count following the 2020 election amid Mr. Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the city. Mr. Trump accused Mr. Schmidt of ignoring “a mountain of corruption and dishonesty.”
Monday’s hearing is the committee’s second in a series scheduled this month.
The panel aims to convince the public of Mr. Trump’s guilt in provoking the attack on the Capitol.
Republicans, who nearly unanimously oppose the committee, accuse Democrats of staging the hearing to try to recast the election and distract the public from the party’s failure to address issues that matter to voters.
• Joseph Clark can be reached at jclark@washingtontimes.com.
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