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Latest revision as of 10:27, 19 July 2022

Hearing 2 opening statements

drafting for boldly adding to hearings article

Chairman Thompson opened the hearing by saying that candidates who respect the rule of law and doubt the tally of votes go to court. Such candidates, he said, live with the court's final decision. Chairman Thompson noted that Trump lost in court and still didn't have the numbers but instead of living with the result he

betrayed the trust of the American people. He ignored the will of the voters. He lied to his supporters and the country, and he tried to remain in office after the people had voted him out and the courts upheld the will of the people.

Thompson said that Trump lost and knew he lost but nonetheless waged

an attack on our democracy, an attack on the American people by trying to rob you of your voice in our democracy, and in doing so, lit the fuse that led to the horrific violence of January 6th, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, sent by Donald Trump to stop the transfer of power.

Vice-Chair Cheney, who had urged all Americans to read Judge Carter's opinion in the first hearing, again asked all Americans to read it. Reading aloud from it, Cheney quoted the court saying

In the months following the election, numerous credible sources–from the President’s inner circle to agency leadership to statisticians–informed President Trump and Dr. Eastman that there was no evidence of election fraud.

Cheney said the hearing would in part cover three points:

following are my words, just for placeholders......

• red shift
• whack dominion conspiracy theory
• campaigns chief lawyer knew there was nothing

... President Trump went ahead with his plans for January 6th anyway. Mr. Chairman, hundreds of our countrymen have faced criminal charges. Many are serving criminal sentences because they believed what Donald Trump said about the election and they acted on it. They came to Washington, DC at his request. They marched on the Capitol at his request, and hundreds of them besieged and invaded the building at the heart of our constitutional republic.

As one conservative editorial board put it recently, "Mr. Trump betrayed his supporters by conning them on January 6th, and he is still doing it." Another conservative editorial board that has long supported President Trump said last week Donald Trump "won't stop insisting that the 2020 — that 2020 was stolen, even though he has offered no proof that that is true." And this: Donald Trump now "clings to more fantastical theories, such as Dinesh D'Souza's debunked 2000 Mules, even as recounts in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin confirm Trump lost." Those are the correct conclusions to draw from the evidence gathered by this committee.

Cheney said they have loads more evidence than can be shown in a single hearing

References

1. Cite error: The named reference JudgeCarterOpinion was invoked but never defined (see the help page).