January 6 Committee Vice-Chair Liz Cheney during the second round of hearings investigating the infamous Capitol Riot said that an "apparently inebriated: Rudy Giuliani advised former President Donald Trump to declare victory on the election night in 2020 despite his campaign advisers suggesting him not to do so.
Trump didn't listen to his campaign advisers and did exactly what a drunk Giuliani suggested. The findings were made in the committee's opening statements on Monday, when Cheney said that Trump's campaign advisers advised him to wait as the counting of mail-in ballots would not be complete until days after the election and it could be a costly mistake.
Giuliani an Embarrassment
Rudy Giuliani was intoxicated on Election Night 2020, according to former Trump campaign advisor Jason Miller, as the 45th president's aides discussed what he should say as the election hung in the balance.
"The mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I did not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president, for example," Miller told committee staff in his videotaped deposition.
At 2:21 a.m. on Wednesday, November 4, Trump appeared at a White House Election Night watch party and made the first of multiple claims that he had won a second term.
Cheney stated Trump "rejected the advice of his campaign specialists on election night" in favor of guidance from "an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani," who advised him to declare victory that night and that the vote count be halted "to falsely claim everything was fraudulent."
"This is a fraud on the American public," Trump said at the time. "This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election."
According to his daughter Ivanka Trump's testimony, it was obvious "very early on" that the election would not be called for several days. According to lawmakers, Trump consciously began pressing his election fraud charges despite being advised that they were nonsense by officials all the way up to Attorney General Bill Barr himself.
"The president understood, even before the election, that many more Biden voters had voted by mail, because President Trump ignored the advice of his campaign experts and told his supporters only to vote in person," Cheney said.
Costly Mistake
Trump was aware, according to Cheney, that the counting of mail-in ballots would take a long time. "This was expected, reported and widely known," she said.
Even Miller said that he suggested Trump that it was not wise to declare victory until the campaign had a better sense of the numbers around election results. However, Trump never listened.
Bill Stepien, Trump's campaign strategist who was set to testify before the committee before his wife gave birth, said it was far too early to declare success in video testimony. "Ballots were still being counted, ballots were still going to be counted for days, and it was far too early to be making any proclamation like that", he said.
Understandably, Giuliani played an important role in Trump's announcement on the Election Night. Giuliani said in his video testimony that he had spoken to the president.
The panel also released audio of its investigators questioning Jared Kushner about former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's assertions that Dominion Voting Systems was involved in a massive conspiracy to manipulate its voting machines against Trump.
"What they were proposing, I thought, was nuts," former White House attorney Eric Herschmann said on video.
"And then the theory was also completely nuts. It was a combination of Italians and Germans, I mean, different things have been floating around as to who was involved - I remember Hugo Chavez, and the Venezuelans, and she has an affidavit from somebody who says they wrote a software or something in the Philippines. It was just all over the radar," Herschmann said.
According to Barr, he informed Trump that the election fraud claims he and Giuliani were promoting were "crazy stuff" and that " they were wasting their time on and doing a great, great disservice to the country."
In the previously unseen video, he claimed the former president's fraud charges came "straight out of the box on election night."
