The select committee’s Tuesday hearing will focus on Donald Trump’s ‘plot’ to press states to individually recount or overturn election results, including Georgia and Arizona in particular.
Live testimony will be given by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his office’s Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, and former Georgia election worker Wandrea ArShaye ‘Shaye’ Moss during the fourth public and televised proceedings.
Raffensperger will take center stage in Tuesday’s hearing because he was one of the GOP targets of Trump’s efforts to name ‘fake electors’ in red states in order to sabotage Biden’s Electoral College victory.
On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence was supposed to accept these alternative electors, allowing Trump to declare victory.
On January 2, 2021, just days before the Capitol riot and election certification, Trump famously called Raffensperger to pressurize him to ‘find 11,780 votes’ to help him overcome Biden’s lead in Georgia.
The former president attempted to retaliate against Raffensperger by endorsing Georgia Republican Representative Jody Hice in this year’s primary election for Secretary of State, but Raffensperger easily defeated Hice.
According to the Arizona Republic, Bowers also received a call from Trump and his attorney at the time, Rudy Giuliani, in late November 2020, informing him that Arizona had passed a new law allowing the state legislature to choose which presidential electors to send to Congress for certification.
The Republican lawmaker from Arizona, who is a Trump supporter, told the newspaper that he requested proof of a law he had never heard of but never received.
Bowers was also pressured to decertify Biden’s victory in the state by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist.
Thursday’s proceedings will be led by Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California who is a member of the panel.
‘Anyone who got in the way of Donald Trump’s continued hold on power after he lost the election was the subject of a dangerous and escalating campaign of pressure,’ according to excerpts from his opening statement.
‘This pressure campaign resulted in a barrage of angry phone calls and texts, armed protests, intimidation, and, all too frequently, threats of violence and death,’ he will say. ‘State legislators were singled out for special attention.
Officials in charge of statewide elections were in the same boat. Local election workers, who were doing their jobs diligently, were falsely accused of criminal activity and had their lives turned upside down.’
‘As we’ll show, the president’s supporters took the former president’s claims of fraud and false allegations against state and local officials as a rallying cry.’
Arizona and Georgia are both swing states that shifted from Trump’s red in 2016 to Joe Biden’s blue in 2020. Biden, on the other hand, won those states by razor-thin margins – 0.4 percent in Arizona and 0.3 percent in Georgia, respectively.
Because of the narrow victory margins, Trump has claimed that the election was rigged and stolen by a Democratic plot to use thousands of bogus mail-in ballots to help Biden win the swing states that helped propel him to the presidency in 2016.
Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani accused Tuesday’s witness Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman of ‘rigging’ the presidential election count in Georgia. The two allegedly brought in’suitcases’ full of votes for Biden, according to Trump and his allies.
The former Georgia election official and her mother have filed a federal lawsuit against Giuliani after receiving death threats after Trump publicly named them and after a state investigation found no wrongdoing on their part.
The Democratic-led panel’s focus on Tuesday comes after three other hearings earlier this month that focused on proving Trump knew he lost the 2020 presidential election but continued to push the ‘Big Lie’ that he won, as well as the pressure campaign on Pence to prevent Congress from certifying the Electoral College results.
On January 6, 2021, Pence’s refusal to give in to Trump’s plot to have him deny the results of Congress and accept the alternative electors prevented Trump from declaring victory in an election he lost.
There could be as many as four more hearings after Tuesday’s, as the select committee aims to wrap up its case against Trump before the 2022 midterm elections, when the House is expected to flip red.