Ex-admin official: Donald Trump 'understood perfectly well that the election was not stolen'

As part of a New York Times analysis on the impact that the Jan 6th hearings are on having on those who are skeptical that Donald Trump will be held to account for the Capitol riot that sent lawmakers fleeing, one Donald Trump insider is claiming that the former president knew fully well that he had lost the 2020 election and that he has been playing a part.

As the Times' Baker wrote, "For a year and a half, Mr. Trump has been shielded by obfuscations and mischaracterizations, benefiting from uncertainty about what he was thinking on Jan. 6, 2021," before adding, "But for a man who famously avoids leaving emails or other trails of evidence of his unspoken motives, any doubts about what was really going through Mr. Trump’s mind on that day of violence seemed to have been eviscerated by testimony presented in recent weeks by the House committee investigating the Capitol attack."

According to the report, the tide has been turning against the former president with each hearing and more witnesses come out of the woodwork to describe his actions leading up to and on the day of the insurrection.

Noting the devastating testimony given by Cassidy Hutchinson, a former senior aide to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Baker wrote, "When added together, the various disclosures have produced the clearest picture yet of an unprecedented attempt to subvert the traditional American democratic process, with a sitting president who had lost at the ballot box planning to march with an armed crowd to the Capitol to block the transfer of power, brushing aside manifold concerns about the potential for violence along the way."

According to attorney Joshua Matz, who assisted the Democrats during both of Trump's impeachments, "The innocent explanations for Trump’s conduct seem virtually impossible to credit following the testimony we have seen. At the very least, they powerfully shift the burden to Trump and his defenders to offer evidence that he did not act with a corrupt, criminal state of mind.”

His assertion is borne out by Anthony Scaramucci -- a longtime Trump associate who briefly held a position in the ex-president's administration.

Speaking with Baker, Scaramucci recalled a conversation with the former president when he made his initial presidential run.

"Anthony Scaramucci, a longtime associate who served briefly in the White House before breaking with Mr. Trump, has talked in the past about Mr. Trump’s power to interpret reality in whatever way suited him. But Mr. Scaramucci said he had concluded that Mr. Trump understood perfectly well that the election was not stolen and that his actions on Jan. 6 to overturn it were illegitimate," Baker wrote before quoting the Trump associate telling him, “I do believe that President Trump knows that the whole thing that he is doing is a ruse. On more than one occasion throughout the campaign he would turn to me and others and say funny things like, ‘Why can’t people realize what you guys realize about me, that I am playacting and full of it at least 50 percent of the time?’ That sort of joking. So he knows that this is all a lie.”

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