days before republicans assume the majority in the house and likely dissolve the january 6th committee, members released a new batch of testimony involving efforts of those closest to the former president and their attempts to overturn the election. i m pamela brown in for anderson tonight. and included in the new transcripts is testimony by donald trump jr. and remarks about what he believed was a, quote, sophisticated legal rationale to overturn the election, as in overturn the will of the people. one nearly identical to what his fathers allies would soon attempt. and there is also some rather unflattering testimony involving first lady melania trump s opinion of trump jr. and others in her husband s inner circle. also tonight, new details of a purported conversation involving senator lindsey graham who said he would become a champion of these baseless election fraud claims if the president s allies could, quote, just give me five dead voters. it is a lot to unpack. let s s
testimony from stephanie grisham, who was a top aide to melania trump while they were in the white house. and she was recounting that, you know, melania trump really sort of began to distrust advice that her husband was getting from donald trump jr., his son, kimberly guilfoyle, junior s fiancee, sidney powell, rudy giuliani. she just felt like her husband was not getting good advise. according to the stephanie grisham testimony, she was also getting a little peeved. people kept showing up in the residence at all hours. melania is up in the residence trying to live her life. at one point she might be in a robe and all of the sudden one of trump s advisers would show up totally unannounced. you could see why perhaps that would be a little bit annoying. can understand that. so john, when you put the latest piece of the puzzle in place along with other pieces we learned this week, like chief of staff mark meadows telling the white house staff to keep a, close hold on oval office meeting
i ll go out and talk about it. i think later in that system it appears lindsey graham said hey, there is no proof here. i m not going forward. i never did anything with it. there is no there there. there is a lot of testimony to read here. if the viewers tonight are looking to spend the next couple of weeks reading through things, sara is doing yeoman s job reading through all the transcripts. but there are hundreds and hundreds of pages. i was reading through some of them today. it s very interesting. there is acknowledgment on the capitol police epic failures. ray epps deposition, a guy who is kind of an fbi plant. lots of interesting things to read in there. but i think cassidy hutchinson was high point of this whole hearings. should have done a mike job after she testified. i want to go back to what we learned today in this testimony because, david, you re saying, look, he was just trying to say give me something credible that i can go out. but five, you know, dead voters
emerging to you? well, i m surprised at how much testimony they actually have accumulated. i think what facilitated it was the process they used of using things like zoom and other media devices that enable them to take countless testimony and with some ease. so that s one of the reasons we have so much. we got it so quietly. no one saw witnesses traipsing in and out of executive sessions for all this. so i think what s coming together is how much support they have, and it s largely republican testimony for the report, which i m plowing through, the 820 some pages of it. and it s extremely well documented. so i m now reading the documentation as well. yeah, it is. and thank godness for sara for highlighting some of the key parts. it s a lot to absorb, but it is
dead voters. it is a lot to unpack. let s start with sara murray, who has been digging through these transcripts all week for us. sara, what more can you tell us about the new details from donald trump jr. s testimony to the committee? pam, this is interesting because we have of course previously reported on the mark meadows text, the former trump white house chief of staff who was so important to this investigation. and donald trump s testimony really digs into those. we previously reported that donald trump jr. had sent a text to mark meadows essentially laying out a way to keep donald trump in power, keep him in the white house. it was very similar to the strategy that his allies actually put forward, as you said. so the committee is asking donald trump jr. essentially why did you send this text. this is what he says. he says perhaps in reading it, it was the most sophisticated and detailed again about things i don t necessarily know too much about. but it sounded plausible. and i