of election fraud were just lies. what they were proposing, that was nuts. the mayor was definitely intoxicated. law firms were not comfortable making the arguments that rudy giuliani was making publicly. evidence today that former president trump knew he lost, and kept telling lies about it. the president accepted that. he said, okay, fine, but what about the others? i told them that it was it was crazy stuff, and i was doing great, doing service for the country. and why the investigation now involves fundraising off claims that were notably false? not only was there the big lie, it was the big group off. tonight, committee member zoe lofgren, republican election lawyer and witness from today s hearing, ben ginsberg. plus, nicole wallace, joy reid, chris hayes lawrence o donnell, ari melber, in our special primetime coverage of the second day of the january 6th hearings. good evening and thank you for being with us tonight. i m rachel maddow here at
election itself irrelevant as to whether or not he stayed in power. now, we talked about this a little bit earlier in the program tonight, as what i think is a disturbingism cation of what has been disturbing implication, i think it is hard to avoid, hard to get away from, that this observebly is one of the things that trump could have potentially built his strategy around, the idea that actually it might be easier to declare fraud than to win because it seems like he was set on both of the elements of that claim before the first vote was ever counted. and it was a mistake. up until now, we have talked about it a lot with donald trump, because he understand understand politics and campaigns, decided to set up against mail-in voting and it was an error this. suggested it wasn t an error, this suggested he had a deliberate scheme to reduce the mail-in ballots, you know, perception of being, a legitimate form of voting on purpose, to that point, that he wanted to be able to, in the
he wasn t looking for a recount he was looking for a nullification. what is the ramifications of that. and it is the antithesis of a democracy and the people s right to vote and being the decision maker who gets to sit in office. i think he was using the recount and using the contest procedures to make his, what turned out to be evidence-free allegations of a fraud and rigged election. so the important point about all of the cases that he brought is that he never came anywhere close to showing evidence, actual evidence, of fraud and rigged elections. it s claire. i want to talk a little bit about all of the lawyers who turned down the opportunity to represent the president of the united states, and what that, about legal ethics, and what does it say about our profession, that sidney powell, or what s her name, jenna ellis
run through the machine several times, it was not true, that we looked at it, we looked at the video, we believe that this was simply not true. we interviewed fbi interview the individuals that are depicted in the videos. it s reportedly where double, triple counting of the ballots happened. and determined that nothing irregular happened in the counting. and the allegations made by mr. giuliani were false. they really did look at all of these crazy claims. that final witness there was a live witness today. he was forced out as u.s. attorney in georgia after being assigned by bill barr to investigate what turned out to be false claims of fraud made by rudy giuliani about georgia s election results. the false claims of fraud about georgia are expected to get a
did the money go, to what committee and how was the money spent and the fact that the campaign finance laws are so bugged up, it is not obviously criminal, it is a subject for another show. but the other bucket that he really may have trouble with, the trump organization might, donald trump himself, is consumer protection laws. this is in the same bucket that they got bannon for, when he was saying he was building a wall, and they were lining their pockets. those typically are handled by state s attorneys general. and not by the federal government. although the federal government could stick their foot in if they could find some wire fraud and it was big and blatant enough, and this may turn out to be that. so in that instance, the way you re talking about that second sort of bucket, any state attorney general in a state where a trump donor made a donation on the basis of false claims, thinking they were donating for example to a fund that didn t actually exist and the money went to