Jan. 6 hearing shows Barr saying Trump 'detached from reality' in pushing 'big lie'

Chairman Bennie Thompson played a video compilation of witnesses describing the scene at the White House on election night after Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden, using testimony from Trump's daughter Ivanka, campaign manager Bill Stepien, and attorney Rudy Giuliani.

Ivanka Trump told the committee in her videotaped deposition she didn't have a "firm view" of what Trump should have said the night of the election.
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Stepien told the committee he recalled Rudy Guiliani "was looking to talk to the president" and said that Trump "disagreed" with the assessment that he should not declare victory right then.

Jason Miller, a Trump campaign spokesman, told investigators that "the mayor was definitely intoxicated" and recalled that he was pushing for Trump to declare victory.

"Effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying we won it," Miller said, "and essentially that anyone who didn't agree to that was being weak."

An attorney for Giuliani subsequently denied that he was drinking alcohol at all that night and said that the committee didn't ask Giuliani about this claim at all during his own testimony before them. "He didn’t drink alcohol that evening, only Diet Coke. He doesn’t know why Jason Miller would make that false claim," his lawyer, Bob Costello, said in a statement to ABC News.

Vice chair Liz Cheney, hitting on the point raised by Miller, added, "President Trump rejected the advice of his campaign experts on election night, and instead followed the course recommended by an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani."

ABC News' John Santucci contributed to this report.

"It was far too early to be making any calls like that," Trump's former campaign manager Bill Stepien told the committee in his video deposition. "Ballots were still being counted, ballots were still going to be counted for days."

Ivanka Trump also told the committee that it was becoming clear the race would not be called that night.

"To the best of my memory, I was saying that we should not go with declare victory until we had a better sense of the numbers," former top Trump aide Jason Miller said in his videotaped interview.

Stepien and Miller said it was former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani who pressured Trump to claim victory. Miller alleged that Giuliani was "definitely intoxicated" at the time, which Giuliani's attorney, Bob Costello, subsequently denied in a statement to ABC News: "He didn’t drink alcohol that evening, only Diet Coke. He doesn’t know why Jason Miller would make that false claim."

The committee aired a snippet of Trump's speech on election night, in which he told the crowd: "We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this."

ABC News' John Santucci contributed to this report.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said the committee will demonstrate that Trump and his closest advisers knew his claims of election fraud were false, but continued to peddle them anyway, and even fundraised off those claims which "rioters later used to justify attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6."

"We will also show that the Trump campaign used these false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told the donations were for the legal fight in the courts. But the Trump campaign didn't use the money for that," she said.

"'The big lie' was also a big ripoff," Lofgren added, going on to use video of Trump to argue that he "laid the groundwork for these false claims well in advance of the election."

Using video testimony, Vice Chair Liz Cheney said the committee will show how Trump and his campaign knew the election was lost but continued to espouse the "big lie," laying out three points to focus on.

"First, you will hear firsthand testimony that the president's campaign advisers urged him to await the counting of votes and not to declare victory on election night. The president understood, even before the election, that many more Biden voters had voted by mail because President Trump ignored the advice of his campaign experts and told his supporters only to vote in person," she said, attempting to illustrate Trump was aware.

"Second, pay attention to what Donald Trump and his legal team said repeatedly about Dominion voting machines," Cheney said, calling them "Far-flung conspiracies with deceased Venezuelan communists allegedly pulling the strings," which even Trump Attorney General Bill Barr and White House lawyer Eric Herschmann didn't believe.

"And third, as Mike Pence's staff started to get a sense for what Donald Trump had planned for January 6, they called the campaign experts to give them a briefing on election fraud and all the other election claims," she said. "On January 2nd, the general counsel of the Trump campaign, Matthew Morgan -- this is a campaign's chief lawyer -- summarized what the campaign had concluded weeks earlier, that none of the arguments about fraud or anything else could actually change the outcome of the election."