Trump's people knew election fraud claims were 'completely nuts.' Yet they kept quiet.

You knew the 2020 presidential election wasn’t rigged. You suspected then-President Donald Trump might have "become detached from reality." You knew he was raising millions of dollars from his lie that the election was stolen.

So why did you wait so long to tell us this? 

That’s the question I had for nearly every Jan. 6 committee witness whose prerecorded testimony we saw during Monday’s nationally televised hearing.

Did you forget that your mouths and vocal cords are capable of projecting the thoughts in your brain to a wider audience? 

How did you sit on that knowledge? How did you watch Trump and his more unhinged enablers, like “attorneys” Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, spin baseless conspiracy after baseless conspiracy, conning voters who supported him out of money and leading some to attack the U.S. Capitol, and not pipe up. How could the lot of you not collectively say, as former Attorney General Bill Barr put it in his testimony, that it was all “bull----”?

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Did you not, at the time, understand how microphones work?

The theory was 'completely nuts'

How do you look at yourselves in the mirror each day and not ask: “If I had spoken up sooner, would the country be in a better place? Could I have helped douse the fires of public rage before they reached the steps of the U.S. Capitol?”

What we saw at Monday’s hearing was a tsunami of damning evidence coming not from the Democrats who make up a majority of the committee but from the mouths of Republican witnesses who served Trump.

You can call the Jan. 6 committee, despite its two devout Republican members, a partisan endeavor, but the people making the case against the former president Monday were either hired or appointed by him.

Trusting the Jan. 6 committee: Jan. 6 was awful. But conservatives have good reasons to question these hearings.

Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien said in videotaped testimony that he stepped away from the Trump campaign because things happening after election night were not “honest or professional.”

Eric Herschmann, a White House lawyer under Trump, said of one of the post-election conspiracies: “What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts. The theory was also completely nuts. Right? I mean, it was a combination of Italians, Germans, I mean, different things floating around as to who was involved.”

Barr said in his recorded testimony: “All the early claims that I understood were completely bogus and silly and usually based on complete misinformation.”

And he noted that after a Dec. 14, 2020, meeting with Trump: “I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy, if he really believes this stuff ... he has become detached from reality.”

You could've spoken up, Mr. Barr

It would’ve been cool if Mr. Barr had brought that concern up to the American people right around that time, because a few weeks later, President Detached From Reality had riled his base into such a lather that they violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to halt the country’s peaceful transfer of power.

But I suppose Barr forgot he could say words out loud and people would hear them and process their meaning. Oops!

We heard audio Monday of Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen explaining he told Trump he was being given “bad information” that was not correct about election fraud.

Alex Cannon, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign, recalled a November conversation with Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows: “I remember sharing with him that we weren’t finding anything that would be sufficient to change the results in any of the key states.”

Cannon also recalled a brief conversation with then-Vice President Mike Pence: “He asked what I was doing on the campaign and I told him that we were looking into some of the issues related to voter fraud and he asked me, I don’t remember his exact words, but he asked me if we were finding anything and I said ... I was not personally finding anything sufficient to alter the results of the election, and he thanked me.”

They all knew this was nonsense. Every person around Trump knew it. And you can bet every Republican who had any kind of contact with people in the Trump administration knew it as well.

The con brought in millions

But they kept their mouths shut. They let the con unspool and they let the misinformation spread. And along with the unconscionable damage done on Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., they let the minds of people across the country get twisted and their wallets emptied by a man who, as many of these witnesses have experienced firsthand, will throw anyone under the bus in a heartbeat.

One of the most telling parts of Monday’s hearing was the detailing of money Trump raised off his election lies. 

A video featuring Amanda Wick, senior investigative counsel for the committee, showed that between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, the Trump campaign sent “millions of fundraising emails to Trump supporters, sometimes as many as 25 a day” relating to election fraud claims.

Knowing full well those claims were false, the campaign encouraged “small dollar donors” to donate to the Official Election Defense Fund. 

“The select committee discovered no such fund existed,” Wick said.

Hanna Allred, a former campaign staffer, is on tape saying, “I don’t believe there is actually a fund called the Election Defense Fund,” and Gary Coby, former Trump campaign digital director, called it a marketing tactic.

Trump and his campaign leveraged that wholly debunked lie to raise $250 million to spend on election defense, or all manner of other things that could benefit Trump.

We know this now because we’re hearing the words of people who were closest to Trump at the time those millions were rolling in from gullible Americans.

The question everyone needs to be asking, the question these witnesses will have to ask themselves for the rest of their lives, is simple: Why in the hell didn’t we hear these words when it mattered most?

Follow Paste BN columnist Rex Huppke on Twitter @RexHuppke and Facebook: facebook.com/RexIsAJerk