Page:Introductory Material to the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.pdf/16

 declared in a letter to the Select Committee that “it was impossible for Kerik and his team to determine conclusively whether there was widespread fraud or whether that widespread fraud would have altered the outcome of the election.” Kerik also emailed President Trump’s chief of staff on December 28, 2020, writing: “We can do all the investigations we want later, but if the president plans on winning, it’s the legislators that have to be moved and this will do just that.” Other Trump lawyers and supporters, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Phil Waldron, and Michael Flynn, all invoked their Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination when asked by the Select Committee what supposed proof they uncovered that the election was stolen. Not a single witness--nor any combination of witnesses--provided the Select Committee with evidence demonstrating that fraud occurred on a scale even remotely close to changing the outcome in any State.

By mid-December 2020, Donald Trump had come to what most of his staff believed was the end of the line. The Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit he supported filed by the State of Texas in the Supreme Court, and Donald Trump had this exchange, according to Special Assistant to the President Cassidy Hutchinson: "The President was fired up about the Supreme Court decision. And so I was standing next to [Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows, but I had stepped back… The President [was] just raging about the decision and how it’s wrong, and why didn’t we make more calls, and just this typical anger outburst at this decision... And the President said I think – so he had said something to the effect of, “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”"

On December 14, 2020, the Electoral College met to cast and certify each State’s electoral votes. By this time, many of President Trump’s senior staff, and certain members of his family, were urging him to concede that he had lost.

Labor Secretary Gene Scalia told the Committee that he called President Trump around this time and gave him such feedback quite directly: "[S]o, I had put a call in to the President—I might have called on the 13th; we spoke, I believe, on the 14th—in which I conveyed to him that I thought that it was time for him to acknowledge that President Biden had prevailed in the election…. But I communicated to the President that when that legal process is exhausted and when the electors have voted, that that’s the point at which that outcome needs to be expected…. And I told him that I did believe, yes, that once those legal processes were run, if fraud had not been established that had affected the outcome of the election, that, unfortunately, I believed that what had to be done was concede the outcome."

Deputy White House Press Secretary Judd Deere also told President Trump that he should concede. He recalled other staffers advising President Trump at some point to concede and that he “encouraged him to do it at least once after the electoral college met in mid-December.” White House Counsel Pat Cipollone also believed that President Trump should concede: “[I]f your question is did I believe he should concede the election at a point in time, yes, I did.”

Attorney General Barr told the Select Committee this: “And in my view, that [the December 14 electoral college vote] was the end of the matter. I didn’t see – you know, I