A key witness, Trump's 2020 campaign manager, was unable to testify.
The House select committee held another public hearing Monday -- this time focused on the "big Lie" pushed by former President Donald Trump and his allies -- that the committee says fueled those who attacked the U.S. Capitol.
Chairman Bennie Thompson gaveled the hearing back in shortly after 12:15 p.m. for the second panel of witnesses.
The three witnesses are Al Schmidt, a former Republican city commissioner in Philadelphia who repeatedly debunked claims of fraud in the state, Ben Ginsberg, a veteran GOP election lawyer, and Byung "BJay" Pak, a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia and Trump appointee.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-California confirmed publicly that Rich Donoghue, a former acting Deputy Attorney General at the Justice Department, will testify in person before the committee. ABC News has previously reported he was in talks to testify.
Donoghue will appear in Wednesday's hearing that will focus on Trump's "pressure" campaign against the Justice Department to investigate fraud, as vice-chair Rep. Liz Cheney announced in last week's hearing.
Chairman Bennie Thompson called a 10-minute recess for the committee's Monday hearing shortly after noon.
The committee played a video of Trump's former Attorney General Bill Barr recalling his December meeting with Trump after he told the Associated Press that there was no evidence of election fraud.
"The president was as mad as I've ever seen him, and he was trying to control himself," Barr recalled. Trump said, ""You didn't have to say this, you must've said this because you hate Trump.'"
I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has lost contact with — he's become detached from reality," Barr said, adding, "There was never any indication in interest in what the actual facts were."
"I felt that before the election, it was possible to talk sense to the president. And while you sometimes had to engage in, you know, a big wrestling match with him, that it was possible to keep things on track. But I was -- felt that after the election he didn't seem to be listening," Barr recalled. "And I didn’t think it was—you know, that I was inclined not to stay around if he wasn’t listening to advice from me or the Cabinet secretaries."
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D- Calif., teed up several clips of then-Attorney General Bill Barr describing his meeting with Trump in late November about election fraud, noting how "even after [Barr] told him his claims of election fraud were false, President Trump continued to promote these false claims."
"I said," Barr recalled, "the department doesn’t take sides in elections, and the department is not an extension of your legal team. And our role is to investigate fraud, and we’ll look at something if it’s specific, credible, and could’ve affected the outcome of the election. And we’re doing that, and it’s just not -- they’re just not meritorious. They’re not panning out."
After that meeting, Barr said Meadows told him Trump 'was becoming more realistic,' and Kushner said 'we're working on this."
