Rep. Cheney: ‘Trump and his advisers knew’ he lost election

(NewsNation) — During Thursday’s long-awaited public hearing on the 11-month House investigation into the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) showed depositions that demonstrated President Donald Trump’s advisers didn’t believe his claims of a stolen election.

“You will see that Donald Trump and his advisers knew that he had, in fact, lost the election. But despite this, President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to convince huge portions of the U.S. population that fraud had stolen the election from him. This was not true,” Cheney said Thursday.

In a preview of Monday’s hearing, Cheney set up snippets of pre-recorded interviews that the committee conducted of Jason Miller, Trump’s former senior campaign spokesperson; Alex Cannon, Trump’s former campaign lawyer; and William Barr, the sitting attorney general at the time.

The clips displayed some previously known information, but the depositions were not seen publicly before.

The first clip Cheney previewed is of Jason Miller, who described a call between the Trump campaign’s internal data expert and Trump a few days after the 2020 election.

“I was in the Oval Office and, at some point (in) the conversation, the lead data person was brought on and he delivered to the president — in petty blunt terms — that he was going to lose,” Miller said in the recorded testimony.

Not long after the segment aired Thursday, Miller took to Twitter, saying his interview was cut off, then providing a thread of the rest of the back and forth. He said Trump believed some of the dozens of legal challenges his team made across the country could succeed.

Alex Cannon, a top Trump campaign attorney looking into those challenges, discussed what he told White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

“I remember a call with Mr. Meadows, who was asking me what I was finding and if I was finding anything, and I remember sharing with him that we weren’t finding anything that would be sufficient to change anything in the key states,” Cannon said.

Former Attorney General William Barr also testified that he didn’t believe there was any widespread election fraud, as he’s said publicly before.

“I repeatedly told the president, in no uncertain terms, I did not see evidence of fraud that would have affected the outcome the election. And frankly, (a) year and a half later I haven’t seen anything to change my mind on that.”

The former president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, said she respected Barr’s opinion.

“I accepted what he said,” she told the committee in a taped deposition.

Cheney said this topic will be explored in upcoming hearings. The next is scheduled for 10 a.m. ET Monday.