In a public hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., used her closing statement to illustrate how post-election litigation efforts were connected to the Trump campaign’s ability to fundraise among supporters.
“If the litigation had stopped on Dec. 14, there would have been no fight to defend the election and no clear path to continue to raise millions of dollars,” Lofgren said, adding that the former President Donald Trump’s donation requests were also used “to disseminate the false claims of election fraud.”
The campaign asked for money to support “the official election defense fund,” but the committee found there was no such fund, a fact backed up by former Trump campaign workers. Instead, most of the money went to a new PAC started by Trump, and the committee found that the PAC made millions of dollars of contributions to pro-Trump organizations, Lofgren said. The emails encouraging donations continued through Jan. 6.
Lofgren acknowledged that political fundraising is one way that Americans are entitled to participate in the electoral process, and that donors “deserve to know the truth” about how their money will be spent by the people they support with their donations.
“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go, and what they would be used for. So not only was there the big lie, there was the big ripoff,” Lofgren said.
The hearing was the second of several planned by the Jan. 6 committee that focused on how Trump actively spread false information about the 2020 election outcome – what has become known as the “big lie” – in the run up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. In the year since its creation, the committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, seeking critical information and documents from people witness to, or involved in, the violence that day.
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