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WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump’s attorney general testified that he believed the president had grown delusional as he insisted on pushing false claims of widespread election fraud that he was told repeatedly were groundless, according to a videotaped interview played on Monday by the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack.
“He’s become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff,” William P. Barr, the former attorney general, told the panel. “There was never any interest in what the actual facts were.”
In a hearing focused on the origins and spread of Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election, the panel played excerpts from Mr. Barr’s testimony, as well as that of a chorus of campaign aides and administration officials who recounted, one after the other, how his claims of election irregularities were bogus.
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The session began with the testimony of Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Bill Stepien, who testified on video that he had told his boss on election night that he had no basis for declaring victory, but Mr. Trump insisted on doing so anyway.
Mr. Trump “thought I was wrong. He told me so,” Mr. Stepien said in his interview.
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Then the panel laid out how Mr. Trump’s initial lie gave way to more falsehoods of election fraud, which grew more outlandish as time wore on. It made extensive use of the recorded testimony from Mr. Barr, who said he had told Mr. Trump repeatedly his claims of fraud were “bullshit.”
At one point during his deposition, Mr. Barr could not control his laughter at the absurdity of the claims, which included defense contractors in Italy using satellites to flip votes and a scheme orchestrated by the former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013.
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The panel fleshed out how there was a power struggle after the election among officials in Mr. Trump’s campaign, the White House, the Justice Department — many of whom repeatedly told him there was no evidence of widespread fraud — and outside figures, including his personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, who fueled the groundless claims of major irregularities.
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On election night, rather than heed Mr. Stepien’s caution, Mr. Trump chose to listen to the advice of an “apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani” and declare victory, said Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee.
Mr. Stepien said there were essentially two teams advising Trump. He called his “Team Normal.”
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The committee asserted that Mr. Trump used the lie of a stolen election to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, duping his donors and ultimately fooling his supporters into showing up at the Capitol to press his bogus claims of a massive election “steal.”
“The big lie was also a big rip-off,” said Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, who was leading the presentation on Monday.
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Evidence about Mr. Trump’s determination to say groundlessly that he had won was interspersed with testimony from Chris Stirewalt, the former political editor of Fox News, who appeared in person and described in detail his data-driven analysis that concluded on election night that Mr. Trump was losing.
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Other witnesses appearing on Monday afternoon included Byung J. Pak, a former U.S. attorney in Atlanta who resigned abruptly after refusing to say that widespread voter fraud had been found in Georgia.
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