During Monday’s January 6 hearing, a video clip was played featuring former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien describing a conversation he had with then-President Donald Trump on election night.
In the clip, Trump disagreed with Stepien’s recommendation to say it was too early to call the race. The committee played the video from Stepien’s deposition where he said he recommended saying it was “too early to tell” who won the race.
“The President disagreed with that,” Stepien said. “I don’t recall the particular words. He thought I was wrong, he told me so, and that they were going to go in a different direction.”
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A clip from Trump’s speech in the early morning hours of Nov. 5, 2020, was also played in which he falsely said he had won.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election, frankly we did win this election,” Trump said at the time.
Stepien was supposed to testify in person at Monday’s hearing, but pulled out just hours before as his went into labor.
Due to this, the committee used a video from his previous deposition to help illustrate his testimony.
Stepien told the committee that as votes continued to be counted in the days after Election Day he and other advisers told Trump that the odds of him winning the election were “5 to 10%.”
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“With each day that wore on, I mean the trajectory of the race on Election Night — Trump ahead in many states — and as that week wore on, as the third became the fourth became the fifth and so on and so forth, and the vote by mail ballots were tabulated, you know, Trump’s lead, you know, grew more narrow. And in, and in some places Biden surpassed, you know, Trump in the vote totals,” Stepien said in a video the committee showed.
Stepien continued, “So as the week wore on, as we paid attention to those numbers, every single — multiple times a day, you know, internally, you know, I was feeling less confident for sure.”