‘What They Were Proposing Was Just Nuts’: Trump Allies Dismiss Election Fraud Claims in Jan. 6 Committee Montage

At Monday’s hearing by the congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot, a montage of clips was introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) showing once close allies of Donald Trump almost left speechless by being associated with election fraud claims pushed by both Trump and lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

After showing a clip of former White House political director Bill Stepien describing Trump officials being broken into two camps once Giuliani was brought on by Trump to investigate supposed 2020 election fraud. Stepien’s team was “team normal,” he described.

Lofgren’s montage began with Giuliani and fellow lawyer Sidney Powell making variously vague claims about ballot dumps and algorithms for Dominion Voting Systems being cheated — something that has not been proven — and then showed former Trump officials, including son-in-law Jared Kushner distancing themselves from these claims.

“What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts,” former White House attorney Eric Herschmann said. “Because the theory was also completely nuts. It was a combination of the Italians, the Germans, different things had been floating around as to who was involved. Hugo Chavez, Venezuelans, she has an affidavit from somebody who said they wrote some software … just all over radar.”

In Kushner’s testimony, he said he confronted his father-in-law at one point about Giuliani’s increasingly bizarre claims and would only say he told the then-president it was “not the approach I would take,” to which Trump replied he had faith his lawyer, the former New York City mayor.

Testimony from Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan was also shown, where the attorney admitted that most law firms expressed they were not comfortable taking on Trump’s case and aligning themselves with the theories that Giuliani was publicly pushing.

“The general consensus was that law firms were not comfortable making the arguments that Rudy Giuliani was making publicly,” he said. “I seem to recall that I had a similar conversation with most all of them.”

The montage ended with Bill Barr calling Trump’s fraud claims “bullshit,” footage that was shown at the first hearing from the committee.

Watch above via MSNBC