A top Democrat on the Jan. 6 committee said there is evidence tying the former president directly to a plan to send fake electors to Congress.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday that the plan to send secondary groups of electors from battleground states was orchestrated not just by the president’s campaign officials but President Donald Trump himself.
“We’ll show evidence of the president’s involvement in this scheme,” Schiff said. “We’ll also, again, show evidence about what his own lawyers came to think about this scheme.”
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During the committee’s second public hearing last week, lawmakers presented the testimonies of several people close to Trump who warned him that efforts to overturn the 2020 election were doomed to fail. Some of the president’s closest allies, who in public fought to overturn the election results, were telling him privately that he had, in fact, lost.
On Thursday, during a hearing that recounted the pressure campaign put on then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject the results of the election and say Trump was still president, the committee presented additional evidence that major players knew their attempts were not going to succeed.
The committee appears to be attempting to lay out a path for the Department of Justice or another body to indict the former president. However, the committee hasn’t been fully cooperating with DOJ, refusing to hand over hundreds of transcripts with witnesses that DOJ says are related to its own investigations.
Evidence that Trump was actively involved in sending fake electors would be another avenue for DOJ to indict the former president.
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Schiff was careful on Sunday not to “get ahead of our hearing” when Bash asked him if the committee has evidence that Trump “directed” any fake set of electors.
“We’ll show during a hearing what the president’s role was in trying to get states to name alternate slates of electors,” Schiff said, noting “how that scheme depended initially on hopes that the legislatures would reconvene and bless it.”
The committee will hold another public hearing on Tuesday, June 21.
