‘Victory no matter what’: Takeaways from Thursday’s Jan. 6 hearing on the Capitol insurrection

© Provided by LA Times A photo of Roger Stone, former advisor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, with members of the Oath Keepers is projected on a screen during a hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on Thursday in Washington. The bipartisan committee has spent nearly a year conducting more than 1,000 interviews, and reviewed more than 140,000 documents regarding the day of the attack. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol returned after a nearly three-month break to summarize and bolster the case it made against President Trump over the summer.

Committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said that the hearing would focus on facts revealing former President Trump’s state of mind and motivations around his election loss.

© (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times) The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, delivers remarks during a hearing in the Cannon House Office Building on Thursday in Washington. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

Members of the committee took turns expanding on different aspects of the former president’s efforts to overturn the election results: Trump’s plan to declare victory before all ballots were counted; that he repeated false fraud claims even as his allies told him he was wrong; and that he privately acknowledged that he’d lost while still trying to change the result.

Here are the key points the committee is making during its ninth hearing:

‘Victory no matter what’

The committee presented new evidence to show that Trump intended to declare victory on election night regardless of what the vote tally showed.

“It was a premeditated plan by the president to declare victory no matter what the result was,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) said. “He made a plan to stay in office before election day.”

Trump and his allies knew that there would be a “red mirage” on election night because of a partisan divide in how people voted. Trump disparaged mail ballots even as his campaign manager Bill Stepien and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) argued that encouraging Republicans to vote by mail could help them on election day. The committee played audio of Trump advisors Roger Stone and Steve Bannon saying that Trump would use the delayed mail ballot votes to his advantage.

“He’s not going down easy,” Bannon told a group of associates a few days before the election, according to audio played by the committee. “If Biden is winning, Trump is going to do some crazy s—.”

Trump privately acknowledged that he’d lost

The committee showed clips of interviews with former Trump staffers who said that he privately acknowledged that he had lost, even as he sought to overturn the results of the election.

“I popped into the Oval [Office] just to, like, give the president the headlines and see how he was doing. And he was looking at the TV and he said, ‘Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?'” former Trump White House staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin said, describing an interaction about a week after the election.

Trump also appeared to acknowledge that he lost through policymaking. In the days after President Biden was declared the winner, Trump ordered the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and Somalia before Biden’s inauguration. The orders were not put into action, and the committee showed video testimony from military officials who said it would have been a disaster if they had been.

© (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times) Former President Donald Trump is projected on a monitor during a hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on Thursday. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)

“These are the highly consequential actions of a president who knows his term will shortly end,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.).

After the Trump campaign suffered another legal defeat in the U.S. Supreme Court in December 2020, a Secret Service agent warned that Trump was “pissed.” Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she witnessed a conversation between former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Trump, in which the former president acknowledged he lost.

“[Trump] had said something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know that we lost, Mark, this is embarrassing, figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost,’” Hutchinson said.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.