Speaking at the Day 9 of the Capitol Riots Hearings, House Select Committee member Zoe Lefgren said that Donald Trump planned “well in advance” with conservative activist Tom Fritton to declare his election victory prematurely.
Evidence presented before the committee showed that Tom Fitton sent an email to Donald Trump on October 31, 2020, in which a comprehensive plan to declare the former president victorious was discussed. Much of the content in the email also appeared in Trump’s speech on election night announcing that he has won.
“We had an election today—and I won,” Fitton’s email memo to Trump read. It also drew out an elaborate plan where only the votes “counted by the Election Day deadline” would matter.
Who is Tom Fitton?
Tom Fitton was born on May 30, 1968, in West Nyack, New York. He is a conservative activist who is the president of the legal activism group Judicial Watch since 2003. He is known for being a close ally of former Republican president Donald Trump.
Fitton studied at the Clarkstown High School South in New York and graduated in 1986. He went on to do a Bachelor’s in English from George Washington University next.
A research article published by the think tank Just Security, at Reiss Center on Law and Security, New York University School of Law, found that Fitton was the third most prolific election misinformation purveyor on Twitter in the last few months of 2020.
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Fitton is also a prominent climate change denier, and under his presidency, Judicial Watch has filed lawsuits against multiple climate scientists. He has also previously claimed that the investigation into the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election was an attempted ‘coup’ against then US president Donald Trump.
He criticized Special Counsel Robert Muller, who was leading the investigation into the matter, and called for it to shut down.
