Hope Hicks as seen onscreen during the Jan. 6 committee’s final hearing on Dec. 19, 2022. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday the House Select Committee had its last public session during which it unanimously voted to recommend that the Justice Department seek criminal charges against Donald Trump and others for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and prevent the peaceful transition of power, culminating in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Most of the information that the Committee presented has been heard before except for the testimony of Hope Hicks.

Hicks, who served as a top adviser to  Trump, testified to the House Select Committee that she told him she was worried he was tarnishing his legacy by promoting the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen.

“We were not seeing evidence of fraud on a scale that would have impacted the outcome of the election,” Hicks said in videotaped testimony shown  during the committee’s final public hearing. “And I was becoming increasingly concerned that we were damaging his legacy.”

Hicks was asked what the president said to her in response.

“He said something along the lines of, you know, ‘Nobody will care about my legacy if I lose so that won’t matter,'” Hicks replied. “‘The only thing that matters is winning.'” Hicks is a longtime confidante of the former president. She worked for the Trump Organization and his 2016 presidential campaign before serving in multiple senior roles in the Trump White House, first as White House communications director, as director of strategic communication and as counselor to the president. She left the White House on Jan. 12, 2021, six days after the Capitol insurrection.

Her interview with the committee was conducted in late October. In introducing video footage of her testimony, Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., said that Hicks was one of the witnesses who came forward after the panel’s last public hearing to “tell us about their conversations with ex-President Trump.”

Over the course of its 18-month investigation, the committee uncovered evidence that Trump was told repeatedly by his campaign advisers, government officials and others that there was no evidence to support his claims of election fraud.

But he “continued to purposely and maliciously make false claims sometimes within a day of being told that a particular claim was false and unsupported by the evidence,” Lofgren said.

“By the time the Electoral College met to cast its votes on Dec.14, 2020, a number of President Trump’s senior staff, cabinet officials and members of his family were urging him to facilitate a peaceful transition to the incoming administration,” she added. “He disregarded their advice and he continued to claim publicly that the election had been stolen from him.”

Trump acted disgracefully and deserves to pay a price!

Tony

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