Trump Falsely Declared Victory on Election Night Following Advice of an 'Apparently Inebriated' Rudy Giuliani
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SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Rudy Giuliani
According to testimonies that aired during a House hearing Monday from those in former President Donald Trump's inner circle, it was an "intoxicated" Rudy Giuliani who convinced the former president to declare victory on election night, despite the fact that vote-counting remained ongoing.
The second day of public hearings by the U.S. House committee investigating the riots of Jan. 6, 2021, offered new revelations about how the former president responded to losing the 2020 presidential election. Among them, that Trump's campaign staffers "urged him to await the counting of votes and not to declare victory on election night," but he instead followed the advice of "an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani to just claim he won and insist the vote-counting stop," Rep. Liz Cheney explained.
As Cheney explained in opening remarks, Trump's aim to convince the American people the election had been stolen from him was part of a seven-part plan to overturn the results.
On Monday, the committee aired pre-recorded testimony from several of those in Trump's inner circle — including daughter Ivanka Trump, attorney Rudy Giuliani, campaign manager Bill Stepien, and campaign spokesperson Jason Miller.
The testimony painted a picture of what election night 2020 was like inside the White House — Trump, Ivanka explained, was holed up in a "room off of the residence" when results started to pour in.
As it became clear that Trump had lost several states that would have been crucial to victory — including Arizona — the excited anticipation of the evening turned to "disappointment with Fox and concern that maybe our data or our numbers weren't accurate," Miller described.
The group — which was gathered in the White House well past midnight, to the early morning hours of Nov. 4, 2020 — began to craft a message: that it was still too early to know who had won the election.
"I don't know that I had a firm vote of what he should say," Ivanka testified. "The results were still being counted. It was becoming clear that the race would not be called on election night."
Stepien concurred, saying in his testimony that he wanted the campaign message to be: "It's too early to call the race ... but we are proud of the race we ran and we think we're in good position and we'll have more to say about this the next day, or the next day."
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But not everyone was in agreement.
"I remember saying that ... we should not go and declare victory until we had a better sense of the numbers," Miller said, adding: "I think effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying, 'We won. They're stealing it from us ... we need to go say that we won.' "
According to their testimony, Giuliani was looking to talk to the president to detail his plan — and he had allegedly been drinking.
"The mayor was definitely intoxicated but I did not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president," Miller said, adding that "there were suggestions ... by Mayor Giuliani to go ahead and declare victory [that night]."
In his own testimony, which also aired Monday, Giuliani said he did speak to Trump that night, more than once.
In remarks delivered that night, Trump did exactly that, saying, "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."
Since that night, Trump has continued to falsely claim the election was stolen from him, making the claims up to — and after — a crowd of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in a deadly and violent scene that temporarily halted the vote count confirming Joe Biden's victory.
