Jan. 6 hearing: Trump officials rejected his voter fraud allegations

WASHINGTON — To debunk President Donald Trump’s claim of widespread voting fraud, the Jan. 6 Committee on Monday turned to several witnesses — all of them Republicans and nearly all of them from the Trump administration.

In person and in video clips from deposition, Trump officials repeatedly said they told the president they had found no evidence of his allegations of fraud.

Here are four examples.

Dominion voting machines

In a video clip at the hearing, Trump called Dominion voting machines fraudulent — an allegation Dominion has challenged in court and won. “With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you can press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden,” Trump said.

But White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, shown in a deposition, said, “I never saw any evidence whatsoever to sustain those allegations.”

Former Attorney General William Barr in a video clip said that when he met with Trump “I specifically raised the Dominion voting machines, which I found to be among the most disturbing allegations — disturbing in the sense that I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations.”

The big dump

The committee showed Trump complaining about voter fraud in another clip: “Here's an example. This is Michigan. At 6:31 in the morning, a vote dump of 149,772 votes came in unexpectedly.”

But Barr in a deposition said he told Trump that was not true.

“I said, ‘Mr. President, there are 630 precincts in Detroit. And unlike elsewhere in the state, they centralize the counting process. So they're not counted in each precinct, they're moved to counting stations,’” he said. “And so, a normal process would involve boxes coming in at all different hours — so there's nothing.”

Barr added, “And I said, ‘Did all the people complaining about it point out to you, you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time? I mean, there's no indication of fraud in Detroit.”

Suitcase full of ballots

Trump complained that a short video clip showed election workers at Fulton County's tabulation center in Atlanta bringing a suitcase of ballots out from underneath a table to be counted in secret after sending Republican monitors home.

Bjay Pak, the former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney in Atlanta. testified Monday, “We found that the suitcase full of ballots, the alleged black suitcase that was being seen pulled from under the table, was actually an official lockbox where ballots were kept safe.”

Richard Donoghue, former deputy attorney general under Trump, said in a clip that “we looked at the tape, we interviewed the witnesses — there is no suitcase. The president kept fixating on this suitcase that supposedly had fraudulent ballots and that the suitcase was rolled out from under the table. And I said, no, sir, there is no suitcase.”

Fake and dead voters in Philadelphia

In Philadelphia, Trump claimed there were more votes than voters and that, as Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani claimed, that 8,000 dead people voted.

“That was absolute rubbish,” Barr said in a clip. “The turnout in Philadelphia was in line with the state’s turnout.”

Barr faulted State Sen. Doug Mastriano, now a Trump-backed candidate for Pennsylvania’s governor.

“He took the number of applications for the Republican primary and he compared it to the number of absentee votes cast in the general election,” Barr said. “But once you actually go and look and compare apples to apples, there's no discrepancy at all.”

Barr added, “At some point I covered that with the president.”

Al Schmidt, a former Republican city councilman who oversaw the 2020 election, told the committee, “Not only was there not evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania, there wasn't evidence of eight.”