WASHINGTON ― Donald Trump listened to drunken advice from Rudy Giuliani instead of his professional campaign advisers, a former Trump campaign adviser testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack.
“President Trump rejected the advice of his campaign experts on election night and instead followed the course recommended by an apparently inebriated Rudy Giuliani to just claim he won and insist that the vote counting stop to falsely claim everything was fraudulent,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Monday while previewing witness testimony in her opening statement of the committee’s second public hearing.
The committee then played video clips of its prior interviews with Giuliani, as well as Trump campaign staffers Bill Stepien and Jason Miller, who said Giuliani told them on Election Day that Trump should declare victory even though ballots were still being counted.
“The mayor was definitely intoxicated but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president,” Miller said in his video deposition in response to a question from committee staffers.
“Mayor Giuliani was saying, ‘We won it. They’re stealing it from us. Where did the votes come from? We need to go say that we won’ and essentially anyone who didn’t agree with this position was being weak,” Miller said.
Miller and Stepien said they told the president it was too early to declare victory.
In his interview with the committee, Giuliani said, “I spoke to the president several times that night.”
The committee then played a clip of Trump that night calling the election a “fraud” and saying, “Frankly, we did win this election.”
