i m jake tapper. aides say this second hearing will drill down on evidence that president trump knew he lost the election but spread false claims of fraud anyway, ignoring court rulings, ignoring the will of the american people. lead-off witness, bill stepien, who has firsthand knowledge about what trump knew about the election numbers. stepien tells cnn he is appearing under subpoena. also testifying today, former fox digital content director chris stirewalt. he was fired after his accurate call of arizona for joe biden. we ll hear directly from republicans who investigated and rejected claims of election fraud in the key states of georgia and pennsylvania, and felt trump s anger for it, former u.s. attorney bijay . . ak and al schmidt and ben ginsburg will testify there was no widespread fraud in 2020 and discuss the trump team s failed challenge to the election results. the select house committee is aiming to connect more dots between the insurrection and its allegation
at the moment, big news. this hearing significantly different this morning now that bill stepien will not testify before this committee due to a family emergency. so, there s a family emergency. i m also being told the committee is attempting to make accommodations so that stepien can testify at one of the later hearings. there are several more. as of right now, manu raju telling us stepien s attorney will read a statement but he has a family obligation so he s unable to testify today. another individual we re expecting to hear from today is chris stirewalt, the politics editor for fox. he was one of the individuals behind the decision to call arizona for biden. they were very early on that. they were connect on that. we did a documentary about this attempted coup, all of this last fall. and we interviewed chris stirewalt for that. i want to play a little bit from that interview and then we can talk about it.
a sitting united states senator was on talk radio calling for my firing over the arizona call. and you didn t think that this would be the kind of guy who would be calling for your firing on the radio. so, that was my first tell like, hmm, okay, something is weird here. and it got really weird, right? and the conspiracy theorizing starts going. people were sending what people were saying on social media. it was this sort of, you know, psychotic, murderous rage about us. and we don t do anything. we re just the weatherman. chris stirewalt from the news operation there at fox, fired, i think i can speak for everybody, that we all respect him, he calls balls and strikes, his favorite metaphor, weatherman. he doesn t tell you if the hurricane is good, just that it s coming. it s remarkable that basically he got fired after doing his job correctly. there s a whole conversation to be had about fox and their
using negative testimony when they have these hearings. he believes that s what was happening thursday night. likely to see more of that today given chris stirewalt, the former fox news analyst, will be testifying who has been at the center of trump s ire since elections night. it was about 11:30 that night and fox called arizona for president biden. that sent shock waves through the trump campaign at the time and kind of caused this eruption in trump s orbit at the white house as they had guests waiting in the east room for the former president to come out because they knew that that really helped narrow that any path to victory, any claims the former president could have to victory. and you saw campaign staff, they were calling fox news, asking them to retract that call for arizona for biden. obviously, that s not something fox news did. biden ultimately went on to win arizona. they just doubled down on saying, yes, they believed he had won that. it really changed the tone that night
decision to do it, but obviously what the committee will be focused on is why the senator said that. why we know that the then president went completely through the roof when he saw fox correctly call arizona for biden. the reason is because the former president early on wanted to make the argument he was doing even before the election. that if he lost, he would argue it was rigged and it was incorrect. having what at the time was, and still is now, his biggest supporter, the biggest mega phone for what he was trying to do, turn on him, from his perspective, hurt that effort. so it was the entirety of the trump world coming down on him and why they did that that is going to be explored. i ll be particularly interested in what he knows, what stirewalt knows about the