Former President Donald Trump is continuing to pay attention to the proceedings of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, which was set to have another public hearing early Monday. On his alternative social media platform Truth Social, Trump flipped out over the panel’s work once again early this Monday.
“This one sided Witch Hunt is a disgrace to America. Should never have been allowed to happen!” Trump belted out in a Monday post. In other words, he sounds fully on the side of shutting down the House’s riot investigation, as though he desperately wants the people responsible for what happened at the Capitol (including, of course, himself) to essentially just get away with it. There’s no sign of any sort of altruistic interest in the truth here, no matter the long-present claims by Republicans that they’re the pro-police ones and the fact numerous police officers were injured by rioters at the Capitol last year. And yet, Donald could become president again, and numerous Republicans — most of the party leaders in the public eye, in fact — are sticking with him.
“The T.V. Ratings for the January 6th Unselect Committee were absolutely awful. Perhaps the reason is that it is being “sponsored” by Adam “Shifty” Schitt and the same people that brought you the Russia, Russia, Russia HOAX, and that the Unselects are not interested in hearing from anyone saying the Election was Rigged and Stolen, despite the EVIDENCE being irrefutable!” Trump ranted on Sunday afternoon. It remains remarkable that someone can listen to this guy and think he’s presidential material. Among the witnesses at Monday’s riot committee hearing will be Bill Stirewalt, a former political editor at Fox News who worked at the network — from which he was eventually fired — when Fox called Arizona for Biden after election results started to roll in following polls closing in the 2020 presidential race.
According to CNN, committee aides indicated the Monday hearing would go over how Trump “embraced false claims of fraud in the 2020 election and how he decided to declare victory in the hours after the election, even though he was told that the numbers didn’t bear it out.” Some of the post-election court cases to which Trump was connected and Trump’s persistence through the consistent losses that his side suffered in court were also set to be subjects of the hearing. Other witnesses scheduled for the Monday hearing originally included ex-Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, although he had to cancel his appearance because of what was reported as a family emergency. But former U.S. Attorney Byung “BJay” Pak, former Philly city commissioner Al Schmidt, and conservative election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg were all set to appear. Among other ties to what’s under investigation by the committee, Pak was among the officials who faced political pressure to act in accordance with Trump’s delusional claims of systematic election fraud.
During a weekend appearance on television, committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said the riot panel could prove that Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false. Asked if members can prove Trump knew he lost the election despite claiming the opposite in public rants, Raskin said: “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 BS. He heard it from the White House counsel. He heard it from all of the lawyers who threatened to resign if he staged his little mini-coup against the Department of Justice by installing someone that would go along with his fairy tale” regarding imaginary fraud.
