Jan 6. hearings: House select committee focuses on Trump's 'big lie'

The House select committee’s series of public hearings resumed Monday as the panel continued to present findings stemming from its 11-month probe of the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Monday’s hearing focused on then-President Donald Trump’s effort to spread lies about the 2020 presidential election.

Testimony revealed that an “intoxicated” Rudy Giuliani told Trump to declare victory on election night, even though aides told the president repeatedly that he didn’t have the numbers needed to win. The House committee also highlighted how Trump’s campaign fundraised off of baseless allegations of election fraud but spent very little of the money on legal action. And former Attorney General William Barr told the committee that Trump became “detached from reality” following his 2020 election loss.

The hearing marked the second in a new series of panels that the select committee plans to hold this month. During the initial primetime hearing on June 9, Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., outlined how the committee plans to use the hearings to reveal what it has learned about the Jan. 6 attack, which Thompson described as the “culmination of an attempted coup.”