Donald Trump’s former spokesperson and senior aide claimed that the January 6 committee distorted his testimony when it was played during Thursday’s explosive primetime hearing.
Tweeting soon after the panel’s hearing on Thursday, Jason Miller said January 6 committee vice chair Liz Cheney “failed to play” the full recording, claiming the testimony was edited.
During the hearing, a video showed Mr Miller explaining how the campaign’s data team knew that the president was going to lose even as November 2020 election results were rolling in.
“In this clip, Miller describes a call between the Trump campaign’s internal data expert and President Trump a few days after the 2020 election,” Ms Cheney said shortly before playing the clip.
Mr Miller was heard saying in the video: “I was in the Oval Office. And at some point in the conversation, Matt Oczkowski, who was the lead data person, was brought on, and I remember he delivered to the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose.”
“And that was based, Mr Miller, on Matt and the data team’s assessment of the sort of county by county state by state results as reported?” the investigators asked Mr Miller.
Mr Miller responded in the affirmative before the clip of the interaction ended.
But Miller has now accused the committee of leaving the excerpt where he talked about Mr Trump’s disagreement with Mr Oczkowski.
In a Twitter thread, he said: “Here’s what came next in my testimony, which Liz Cheney failed to play”.
He said he told the investigators that Mr Trump disagreed with Mr Matt’s analysis when he told him that the numbers show he is going to lose.
“Q: On what basis? Did he give a basis?
“A: He believed that Matt was not looking at the prospect of legal challenges going our way and that Matt was looking at purely from what those numbers were showing as opposed to broader things to include legality and election integrity issues which, as a data guy, he may not have been monitoring.”
The claim came hours after the committee investigating January 6 and the attack on Congress opened with bombshell video footage, showing Mr Trump’s aides, including his daughter Ivanka Trump, who rejected her father’s claims that the election was stolen.
Ms Cheney also claimed she had evidence that the former president thought Mike Pence, his then-vice president, “deserved” to be hanged.
Among the never-before-seen video testimonies, former attorney general Bill Barr told investigators that he thought his former boss was a fraud and his claims were “bulls***” while allegations of rigged voting machines were “crazy stuff”.
