The meeting that changed history and 3 other takeaways from the latest Jan. 6 hearing
Former President Trump knew there was no evidence of widespread election fraud because people close to him told him so on multiple occasions.
Many of those same close advisers repeatedly told Trump to concede after the Electoral College voted in mid-December to confirm President Biden's 2020 victory.
But Trump instead made a fateful choice in the early morning hours of Dec. 19, days after the electors voted, to choose a path that led to the insurrection on Jan. 6.
That's according to witness testimony and evidence presented at the seventh Jan. 6 committee hearing Tuesday.
"President Trump is a 76-year-old man; he is not an impressionable child," said committee Vice Chair Rep.
Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., responding to those defending the former president and saying that Trump was simply influenced by the wrong people. "Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices."
She added that perhaps more than anyone else in the country, Trump had access to "detailed and specific information" showing that claims of widespread fraud in the election were not true, but he chose not to believe it.
"No rational or sane man in his position could disregard that information and reach the opposite conclusion," Cheney said.
Cheney, who warned of potential witness tampering at the end of the last hearing, also dropped toward the end of this one that Trump had tried to call one of the witnesses who hasn't testified yet. She said it had been referred to the Justice Department.
The committee spent much of the hearing detailing the "tense" late-night Oval Office meeting with Rudy Giuliani, conspiracy theorist lawyer Sidney Powell, ex-Gen. Michael Flynn, who has ties to the QAnon movement and extremist groups, as well as former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne on one side and White House lawyers Pat Cipollone, Eric Herschmann and staff secretary Derek Lyons on the other.
It was essentially the White House professionals, or a version of "Team Normal," as former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien coined it in an earlier hearing, against, let's call them, Team Conspiracy.