Rudy Giuliani was “apparently inebriated” on election night in November 2020 when he urged Donald Trump to declare prematurely and wrongly that he had beaten Democrat Joe Biden for the presidency.
Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice-chair of the congressional select committee investigating the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 by extremist Trump supporters, declared as much during her opening remarks on Monday in the committee’s second public hearing of six in Washington DC. The first hearing was last Thursday.
“You will also hear testimony that Donald Trump rejected the advice of his campaign experts on election night and instead followed the course recommended by an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani to just claim he won and insist that the vote counting stop, to falsely claim that everything was fraudulent,” Cheney said.
Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House of Representatives panel, had already outlined that the public would hear how Trump “lost an election and knew he lost an election and as a result of this loss decided to wage an attack on our democracy” by inciting the deadly violence on 6 January as rioters broke into the Capitol to try to stop the official certification of Biden’s victory.
On the night of 3 November 2020, Trump was at the White House with family and aides watching election night coverage.
A witness at Monday’s hearing, Chris Stirewalt, a former politics editor for Fox News, testified that the conservative cable channel’s “decision desk” on the night was “the best in the business” and, controversially, beat other outlets to be the first to declare that Biden, not Trump, had unexpectedly won in the pivotal state of Arizona.
That result was a huge blow to the Republicans that caused anger and dismay among those gathered at the White House, both the result itself and the fact that it was Fox News that had called it, the committee heard.
Jason Miller, an attorney then advising Trump, testified to the committee by video that at that point on the night, “there were suggestions by, I believe it was Mayor Giuliani, to go and declare victory and say that we’d won it outright.”
And he described Giuliani, a lawyer and former mayor of New York who was also advising Trump, as “definitely intoxicated”.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, testified on video that she opined on the night that it was too early to announce that the election was decided, let alone that her father had won.
And Donald Trump’s then campaign manager Bill Stepien also said that he did not think the president should declare victory on election night, but the president disagreed with him.
“It was far too early to be making any calls like that, ballots were still being counted,” Stepien testified.
Trump falsely declared victory in the early hours of Wednesday, 4 November.
The election was ultimately called for Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris on Saturday 7 November.
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