The House Jan. 6 committee on Thursday shared evidence that showed close advisers to Donald Trump called for him to declare victory on Election Day 2020, even before votes had been fully counted, as part of a strategy to claim victory no matter what happened.
Trump ultimately did just that, saying in a nighttime speech at the White House after polls closed, “Frankly, we did win this election.”
That pronouncement, and Trump’s call for his supporters to descend on Washington, D.C., ultimately led to the insurrection attempt on Jan. 6, 2021.
But days before the election, committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) said, Trump advisers laid out the plan in writing and on tape.
One draft Election Day statement for Trump, which Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton sent to White House aides on Oct. 31, 2020, read: “We had an election today ― and I won.”
The draft statement uses the term “Election Day deadline,” even though no such deadline exists, in an apparent attempt to lend credence to the effort not to count millions of ballots.
“The ballots counted by the Election Day deadline show the American people have bestowed on me the great honor of reelection to President of the United States,” the draft statement from Fitton read.
Fitton wrote again to White House aide Molly Michael after 5 p.m. on Election Day, claiming he’d “just talked to him about the draft below,” an apparent reference to Trump.
The plan to simply declare victory before the actual election results were known was apparently circulating within the White House: Greg Jacob, Vice President Mike Pence’s chief counsel, testified that he heard from Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, that “there was a possibility that there would be a declaration of victory within the WH that some had pushed for, and this was prior to the election results being known.”
Campaign manager Bill Stepien said in a videotaped testimony played Thursday that “it was far too early to be making any calls like that; ballots were still going to be counted for days.”
But Trump went the opposite direction, declaring on election night, with millions of votes still uncounted: “We want all voting to stop.”
Trump was apparently mulling the strategy as early as the previous summer. Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, “told us he understood that President Trump planned as early as July that he would say he won the election even if he lost,” Lofgren said.
Others in Trump’s circle outlined the plan on tape ahead of Election Day, according to the committee.
“What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory,” Bannon said on Oct. 31, 2020, according to an audio record obtained by the committee. “If Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s going to be even crazier, because he’s going to sit right there and say, ‘they stole it.’”
“If Biden’s winning, Trump is going to do some crazy shit,” he added.
Roger Stone — who, like Bannon, received a Trump pardon in the weeks after Election Day — said on Nov. 1, 2020, “I really do suspect it’ll still be up in the air. When that happens, the key thing to do is to claim victory. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. ‘No, we won, sorry, fuck you.’”
The committee obtained footage of Stone’s comments from the Danish filmmaker Christoffer Guldbrandsen, Lofgren said.
Even weeks later, after Trump’s legal efforts to challenge the election results had failed, he was dead set on declaring victory.
When several Republican attorneys general failed to convince the Supreme Court to take one last coordinated lawsuit to overturn the results, Trump was furious, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson said in a videotaped testimony played at the hearing.
“The president was fired up about the Supreme Court decision,” she said, recalling a conversation between Trump and his then-chief of staff Mark Meadows. “The president was just raging about the decision, about how it’s wrong and ‘why didn’t we make more calls?’”
Then, Trump showed his hand, Hutchinson recalled.
“He had said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark.’ This is embarrassing.”