Former special counsel Jack Smith told Congress on Thursday that if he thought it would have worked to convince the public, President Donald Trump would have promoted the idea that "Martians" stole the 2020 election.
Smith said during his testimony to the House Oversight Committee that he believed overwhelmingly that Trump was responsible for the Jan. 6 attack and that without him there would not have been an attack on the Capitol.
Speaking to the grand jury, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, "I have told him more times than we can count that he fell short. ... If you told him Martians came and stole votes, he’d be inclined to believe it."
Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calf.), who previously sat on the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6, asked "What does that tell you about Trump's state of mind?"
Smith answered: "That statement is consistent with what was found in our investigation, in that our investigation revealed that Donald Trump was not looking for honest answers about whether, there was fraud in the election. He was looking for ways to stay in power.
"And when people told him, things that conflicted with him staying in power, he rejected them, or he chose not even to contact people like that, who would know if the election was done properly in the state? On the other hand, when individuals, would say things that would allow him to stay in power no matter how fantastical he would latch on to those. That pattern, over time, we felt, was powerful evidence that he, in fact, knew that the fraud claims were making were false," he continued.
Lofgren initially noted that the overwhelming majority of people who testified in the Jan. 6 case were Republicans. She asked Smith if he would name them.
"They ranged from people on his campaign team who had, wanted him to win, were employed to help him win the election. They included state officials, state Republican officials who, wanted him to win, voted for him, campaigned for him, asked him to provide, asked him and his coconspirators to provide evidence to support their claims. And invariably, they never did it included officials, advisers, people he worked with in the White House who he relied upon for important decisions and who he trusted in other contexts. We felt we had strong evidence from a variety of sources," Smith said.
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