Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Bloomberg via Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- After nearly two hours on Monday, Chairman Bennie Thompson gaveled out the House Jan. 6 committee's second hearing this month to publicly unveil the findings of an 11-month-long investigation which found, the committee said, that former President Donald Trump was at the center of a "multistep conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election." Monday's hearing used firsthand accounts from Trump's inner circle -- including his daughter, son-in-law, former campaign manager and former attorney general -- to focus on how he pushed the "big lie" of a stolen 2020 race to millions of supporters even though almost all of his advisers -- except, most notably, Rudy Giuliani -- told him that he had lost to Joe Biden. The committee said Trump went on to fundraise $250 million off of his baseless claim, which committee members cast as key in compelling people to storm the Capitol in the deadly insurrection last year. "We will tell the story of how Donald Trump lost an election and knew he lost an election and, as a result of his loss, decided to wage an attack on our democracy -- an attack on the American people by trying to rob you of your voice in our democracy," Thompson said at Monday's hearing. "And in doing so, lit the fuse that led to horrific violence on Jan. 6, when a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, sent by Donald Trump to stop the transfer of power." In live and taped testimony, both former Trump administration officials and GOP state election officials recounted telling his White House and his campaign that there was no widespread fraud -- but to no avail. "[Trump] betrayed the trust of the American people. He ignored the will of the voters. He lied to his supporters and the country. And he tried to remain in office after the people had voted him out and the courts upheld the will of the people," Thompson said in his opening statement. This was the hearing's central theme: Trump knew his extraordinary efforts to undercut the 2020 election had no merit, but he kept pushing well beyond the limits of normal challenges to the results. Trump, for his part, continues to call the investigation politically motivated and says he did nothing wrong. Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, the committee's vice chair, outlined on Monday how Trump was urged by some aides not to declare victory on election night and was informed that "many more" Democratic voters would vote by mail, meaning their votes would be coming in more slowly and the results were not yet final -- but Trump "rejected the advice of his campaign experts on election night, and instead followed the course recommended by an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani," Cheney said. Here are some other key takeaways from the hearing. Trump's inner circle repeatedly told him claims were false Using taped testimony from at least 10 individuals, the committee showed how Trump's closest advisers repeatedly told their boss in the weeks after the election that there was no evidence of widespread fraud, illustrating -- according to the committee's presentation -- how Trump knew the truth but ignored it. At the top of the hearing, the committee played a video compilation of witnesses describing the scene at the White House on election night in 2020 after Fox News called Arizona for Biden -- including interviews with Trump's former campaign manager Bill Stepien (who had to unexpectedly back out of testifying live on Monday after his wife went into labor), as well as Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Ivanka Trump told the committee in previously taped video that she didn't have a "firm view" of what her dad should have said the night of the election, while his campaign spokesman Jason Miller told investigators that a "definitely intoxicated" Giuliani was pushing for Trump to declare victory. (Giuliani has repeatedly dismissed claims that he has a drinking problem or that alcohol adversely affects his behavior.) "Effectively, Mayor Giuliani was saying we won it," Miller said in taped testimony of what happened on election night, "and essentially that anyone who didn't agree to that was being weak." Asked during his own pre-recorded testimony if he ever shared his view of Giuliani with the president, and what he told Trump, Kushner recalled telling him, "Basically, not the approach I would take if I were you." Asked how Trump reacted, Kushner recalled the president saying, "I have confidence in Rudy." In other notable testimony, Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann reiterated that the Trump-backed conspiracy about Dominion voting machines in the weeks after the election was not persuasive. "I never saw any evidence whatsoever to sustain those allegations," he said after Cheney characterized the allegations as "far-flung conspiracies with deceased Venezuelan communists allegedly pulling the strings." But Trump's former Attorney General Bill Barr offered some of the most striking testimony on Monday, appearing to revel in the chance to tell his side in taped testimony -- though publicly he has walked a fine line: broadly supporting the president while calling out his specific election fraud claims as false. Barr offers his view of Trump's thinking According to video excerpts of Barr's testimony to the committee that were played Monday, he described a meeting with Trump in late November where he told Trump the president's allegations of election wrongdoing weren't holding up. Barr spoke bluntly to House investigators, calling Trump's statements "bogus and silly," "idiotic," "disturbing" and "complete nonsense," among other characterizations in his testimony. "I said," Barr recalled, "the Department [of Justice] doesn't take sides in elections, and the department is not an extension of your legal team. And our role is to investigate fraud, and we'll look at something if it's specific, credible and could've affected the outcome of the election. And we're doing that, and they're just not meritorious. They're not panning out." (As Barr noted, he told DOJ attorneys in the days after the 2020 election to probe possible fraud -- an unusual move that Biden's team at the time argued was meant to undercut his victory.) After his late-November 2020 meeting, Barr said, Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows told him that Trump "was becoming more realistic" and Kushner said, 'We're working on this." But Trump did not back down. The committee then played video of Barr recalling a December meeting with Trump, with Barr recalling that "the president was as mad as I've ever seen him, and he was trying to control himself." "Trump said, 'You didn't have to say this, you must've said this because you hate Trump,'" Barr remembered, going on to say he was concerned for Trump's state of mind. "He's become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff," Barr said he was thinking. "There was never an indication in interest in what the actual facts were." Barr also mentioned -- and laughed at -- the movie "2,000 Mules," a conspiracy-laden film by conservative activist Dinesh D'Souza that Trump has encouraged supporters to watch. "I felt that before the election, it was possible to talk sense to the president. And while you sometimes had to engage in, you know, a big wrestling match with him, that it was possible to keep things on track. But I felt that after the election he didn't seem to be listening," Barr told the committee. "And I didn't think it was -- you know -- that I was inclined not to stay around if he wasn't listening to advice from me or the Cabinet secretaries." Committee establishes 'Team Normal' ve