Chairman opens hearing
Chairman Bennie Thompson convened the committee's fourth hearing this month shortly after 1 p.m. and previewed the pressure campaign he said Trump and his allies put on election officials in key states with the aim of overturning the 2020 election.
In his opening statement, Thompson said "pressuring public servants into betraying their oaths was a fundamental part of the playbook" and that, in 2020, only a handful of election officials in key states "stood between Donald Trump and the upending of American democracy."
"Everything we describe today -- the relentless, destructive pressure campaign on state and local officials -- was all based on a lie. Donald Trump knew it," Thompson said. "He did it anyway."
Explaining how the U.S. elects its president with the Electoral College system, Thompson also warned that "the lie hasn’t gone away" but is still "corrupting our democratic institutions," citing an example of a county commissioner in New Mexico who refused to certify primary results last week.
"People who believe that lie are now seeking positions of public trust," Thompson said. "If that happens, who will make sure our institutions don’t break under the pressure? We won’t have close calls. We’ll have catastrophe."