The select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attacks switched its focus to the life-altering toll the president’s pressure campaign had on those who refused to endorse the Trump team’s baseless theories.
Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss (L), former Georgia election worker, testifies during the fourth hearing on the January 6th investigation as her mother Ruby Freeman (R) listens in the Cannon House Office Building on June 21, 2022 in Washington, DC.(KEVIN DIETSCH/GETTY IMAGES)
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol took a modestly different approach to Tuesday’s hearing: letting prominent elected officials and lesser-known poll workers share the personal and life-altering toll of the White House pressure campaign to interfere with the 2020 election.
Members of the select committee said the efforts to rope in former Vice President Mike Pence “wasn’t an isolated incident” and happened “simultaneously” as former President Donald Trump and his allies zeroed in on state and local elections officials to overturn the results. The officials, who are all Republicans, specifically detailed how Trump’s world tried to erase President Joe Biden’s narrow leads in Georgia and Arizona through legally dubious practices.
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“State legislators were singled out. So, too, were statewide election officials, even local elections officials diligently doing their jobs were accused of being criminals,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, a Democratic member on the committee who previously served as an impeachment manager during the first proceeding against Trump.
“Anyone who got in the way of Donald Trump’s continued hold on power after he lost the election was the subject of a dangerous and escalating campaign of pressure,” Schiff added.
The personal consequences, however, were the most notable parts of the hearing, which was the fourth in a month-long series seeking to uncover information about the Jan. 6 attack, what led up to it and the aftermath.
Arizona House Speaker Russell Bowers clearly and emotionally described the professional and personal toll the pressure campaign had on him. Bowers is a conservative Republican who said he wanted Trump to win but defended his state’s popular vote for Biden. He described the "disturbing" harassment his family and neighbors endured. He said his adult daughter, “who was gravely ill,” was concerned by the threats at the time.
Meanwhile, in his home state of Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said his email and cellphone were “doxxed,” meaning they became publicly available. And he recalled the worst threats leveled at his wife and family, which he believed were happening as a way to rattle him and persuade him to give in to pressure exerted personally by the former president.
“Then eventually my wife started getting the texts. Hers typically came in as sexualized attacks, which were disgusting,” Raffensperger said. “And then some people broke into my daughter in law’s home. My son has passed, and she’s a widow and has two kids, and so we’re very concerned about her safety also.”
But the greatest impact of such threats roiled the lives of longtime poll workers who were never previously attacked for doing their jobs and were reluctantly thrown into the public sphere.
Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, who were both election workers in Fulton County, Georgia, during the 2020 election, described how public attacks from former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the former president upended their lives. During the call to Raffensperger to “find the votes,” Trump referenced Freeman and called her “a vote scammer and hustler.”
Freeman said she’s frightened to use her name or give out business cards. Moss, who testified on Tuesday, said she no longer goes to the supermarket and blamed herself for the threats aimed at her family.
“A lot of them were racist. A lot of them were just hateful,” Moss, who is Black, said through tears. “This has affected my life in a major way, in every way, all because of lies.”
While the hearing featured the personal fallout for many after Jan. 6, lawmakers still tried to build the case of how the White House sought to subvert the election and who else may have been involved in the state-level push.
The committee revealed part of a text conversation where a staffer for GOP Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin tried to get an aide for Pence to give the vice president an “alternate slate of electors” for Michigan and Wisconsin. The Pence staffer replied: “Do not give that to him.”
After the revelations of the texts, Johnson’s spokeswoman said in a statement that the senator didn’t play a role in creating the alternate slate and the exchange was at the staffer level only.
“The senator had no involvement in the creation of an alternate slate of electors and had no foreknowledge that it was going to be delivered to our office. This was a staff to staff exchange. His new Chief of Staff contacted the Vice President’s office,” Alexa Henning tweeted Tuesday.
Bowers also received a lot of pressure from Trump’s orbit and even those in Congress. The Arizona House speaker said he got a call the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, from fellow Arizona Republican Rep. Andy Biggs, asking him to support decertification of the state’s electors. Bowers said he declined the request.
Schiff gave Bowers an opportunity to respond to Trump’s critical statement of him in real time. Minutes before the hearing, Trump claimed that Bowers had said the 2020 election was “rigged and that I won Arizona. Bowers should hope there’s not a tape of the conversation.”
Bowers, whose attorneys read him the statement prior to testifying on Tuesday afternoon, said parts of his call with Trump were true but others were false, including that he told the former president that he won Arizona.
Bowers said he repeatedly pressed Giuliani for proof regarding his fraud claims that thousands of immigrants living in the country illegally and deceased individuals voted in 2020. During a meeting in Phoenix, Bowers recalled Giuliani saying, “We’ve got a lot of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.” Bowers said he wasn't sure if that was a “gaffe.”
Without “strong judicial quality evidence, anything that would say to me: ‘You have a doubt, deny your oath,’ – I will not do that,” Bowers said. “And it’s a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired, of my most basic foundational beliefs, and so for me to do that, because someone just asked me to is foreign to my very being.”
Georgia’s top election officials, Raffensperger and his deputy Gabriel Sterling, also went through the very thorough process to review and validate the state’s election results showing a slim Biden victory after three recounts. Following the 2020 election, Sterling sought to debunk misinformation about the results, though he noted the frustration of trying to compete with Trump’s counter messaging.
“It was kind of like a shovel trying to empty the ocean,” Sterling said, adding that he had to convince family members there was no widespread fraud. “The problem you have is you’re getting into people’s hearts. Once you get past the heart, the facts don’t matter as much.”
As anticipated, the select committee played audio from the highly publicized call where Trump asked Raffensperger “to find 11,780 votes” – the minimum number of votes needed for the former president to overcome Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia.
Raffensperger defended the state’s election, which he described as “remarkably smooth” given that it was conducted in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. He also denied the claims that 5,000 deceased people voted in Georgia, noting only four examples of that happening.
“What I knew is that we didn’t have any votes to find. There were no votes to find,” Raffensperger testified. “And there was no shredding of ballots.”
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