recap. a definitive summary of what happened today. so you will not have missed a thing. let s start. [laughs] all right, first, the first drama at the hearing today was when it did not start. on the books, it 10 am start date, the committee didn t start the hearing today until more than 45 minutes after that announced time. the reason was that the first witness was gone. the investigators previously announced that there would be two panels of witnesses in today s hearing. the first panel would include the political director from the fox news channel, the gentleman on the left side of your screen. but also, the campaign manager from the trump campaign 2020. they were both expected to testify to the fact that trump definitively lost the election. that s why it was so dramatic, that shortly before the hearing was due to start this morning, news broke that the trump campaign manager, bill stepien, would no longer be appearing. family emergency, the headline said. an hour or so and soothe
investigation, did you find similar dissent about this fundraising? and about what appears to be an incredibly cynical con on people, to extract money from them, when there was no actual activity they were fundraising for? not a lot, honestly. i ve had a lot of questions since the hearing this morning, about the fundraising and financial issues. and i m thinking that although we didn t have time in the hearing this morning to go through all of this stuff that we have, that maybe we should provide a little more information to the public about some of these items, the details, the fundraising and the like. so, i will work with our council, and the chairman, to see if we can accomplish that. congresswoman, this is joy reid. i, also, was very interested in the 200 and $50 million. and the sort of designations of or that went, including to the trump hotel group.
$204,857 to the trump hotel collection, over 5 million to event strategies incorporated, a company that ran president trump s january 6th rally on the day. we found evidence that the trump campaign misled donors as to where their phones would go and what they would be used for. not only was there a big lie, it was the big rip off. she did most of the heavy lifting at the hearing today, i should also tell you that after the hearing zou lofgren told cnn that, just one example of former trump and trump and his family, find they benefited from those donations that were marked to fund the election. donald trump jr. s girlfriend was apparently paid $60,000 for what you re seeing right here. she was paid $60,000 for her two and a half a minute long speech at trump s rally on
about partisanship. the law firms were not come for making the arguments that rudy giuliani was making publicly. this is not about political strategy, this is not about aggressiveness versus non aggressiveness. this is about lawyering. this is about the law. this is about what counts as real lawyering and what it is to contest legitimate concerns about an election versus whatever that was that donald trump and rudy giuliani were doing up to and on january 6th 2021. joining us now is ben ginsburg, he is the most prominent republican lawyers in the history of the united states. he represented george w. bitch bush he was a witness today at the hearing. he testified as to what it means to actually contest an election on legitimate grounds and the distance between that fairly normal course of events and what the trump campaign devolved to before january 6th. ben ginsburg, i know it s been a long day, thank you so much
presented, that president trump may have raised funds on these false election claims, under false pretext, telling these supporters that his funds will go to election efforts, when the funds did not exist. what is the significance of that in terms of the president s culpability? well, he conned his voters. i think there are two issues here. he ripped people off. and number two, he used the fundraising emails as a another mode to disseminate the big lie. and i don t know, if you noticed at the end of our hearing today, some of the rioters on january 6th reciting elements of the so-called fraud. so, it was twofold. it was to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, but also, to help disseminate the front line. since the hearing this morning, there has been some statements, i can t all of their conflicting statements or