Jan. 6 committee holds second hearing

BJay Pak, the former US attorney for the North District of Georgia, said his office found that the alleged "suitcase full of ballots" was an official lockbox.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has petitioned the US Supreme Court to take up a lawsuit against Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Georgia, claiming that there are voting irregularities in each state that still require investigation.

The filing says there is video of "suitcases full of ballots being pulled out from underneath tables after poll watchers were told to leave."

Georgia Secretary of State's office investigated these but didn't find any evidence of fraud.

Pak said his office conducted its own investigation and found that the "suitcase full of ballots" was an official lockbox where ballots were stored to be kept stafe. The boxes were kept under the tables, he said.

Pak said there was a "misunderstanding" and the partisan poll watchers, assigned by each respective, were told they were done counting ballots for the night and were told they could go home.

Pak said they brought back the official ballot box and the poll workers started counting the ballots from the lockbox that was initially packed up.

"Unfortunately, during the Senate hearing, Mr. Giuliani only played a clip that showed them pulling out the official ballot box from under the table," Pak said.

"In actuality, in review of the entire video, it showed that it was an official ballot box that was kept underneath the tables," Pak added. "Then we saw them pack up, because the announcement they thought they were done for the night — once the announcement was made that they should continue counting, they brought the ballot box back out."

Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican, said the threats against him became more specific and more graphic after former President Donald Trump tweeted against him.

Trump, who continues to make unfounded claims about voter fraud and claims that the election has been stolen from him, had attacked Schmidt on Twitter on Nov. 11, 2020, calling him a "RINO," or a "Republican in name only."

"He refuses to look at a mountain of corruption & dishonesty. We win!" Trump had tweeted.

Al Schmidt, who served as the only Republican member of Philadelphia's three-member city commission overseeing the 2020 presidential election, said the commission investigated claims made by Trump and his team of election fraud and found none.

These claims, made by Trump's allies, included an allegation by Rudy Giuliani that 8,000 dead people voted in the state of Pennsylvania in 2020. Schmidt said this was not true.

Schmidt said that the team "took seriously every case that was referred to us, no matter how fantastical, no matter how absurd," including the claim of thousands of dead voters.

Former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt is testifying now before the Jan. 6 committee hearing.

The Republican official was a notable voice in the aftermath of the 2020 US presidential election, when he debunked then-President Donald Trump's baseless claims about election fraud in the city.

Schmidt's home state of Pennsylvania was key in the Trump campaign's efforts to potentially overturn the 2020 election results.

Schmidt was in a position to investigate fraud claims after the 2020 election, and did not uncover evidence of substantial fraud.

Former US attorney for the North District of Georgia BJay Pak, who abruptly quit during then-President Donald Trump's mission to overturn the results of the election, is testifying now before the Jan. 6 committee. He was in the position to investigate fraud claims after the 2020 election, and did not uncover evidence of substantial fraud.

Pak resigned from his position after learning that Trump was considering firing him in early January, around the same time that Trump urged Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, to "find" enough votes for Trump to win.

He is appearing before the House select committee Monday voluntarily after receiving a letter of invitation. He is not testifying under a subpoena, his attorney, Edward Kang, told CNN.

The circumstances surrounding Pak's departure were among the lingering mysteries from a chaotic stretch in early January. At the time, Trump and his allies were focused squarely on Georgia as they sought to push unfounded claims of mass election fraud. Two days before Pak's resignation on Jan. 4, Trump pressured Raffensperger to validate bogus claims of election fraud in the state.

After Pak's surprise resignation, Trump replaced him with his US attorney in Savannah, bypassing the normal chain of succession and raising suspicions about Pak's departure.

CNN's Evan Perez and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.

Read more background on Pak here.

Former President Donald Trump’s Attorney General William Barr provided the House Jan. 6 Committee with a detailed, point-by-point rebuttal of Trump’s false claims about the election in his closed-door deposition. 

In lengthy excerpts of Barr’s taped deposition played during Monday’s hearing, Barr told the committee there was an “avalanche” of fraud allegations coming into the Justice Department after the election that he likened to “playing whack-a-mole.

“There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Barr said. “My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud. And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that.” 

On Dec. 1, 2020, Barr told the Associated Press that the Justice Department did not find substantial evidence of voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election. Trump was furious at Barr during an Oval Office meeting later that day, Barr said in his deposition.

Among Barr’s rebuttals of fraud played at Monday’s hearing: 

Clarification: This post has been updated to clarify when the "absolute proof" exchange between Barr and Trump took place.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the US Capitol is back after taking a short break.

Here's who is testifying next:

Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told the House Jan. 6 committee that as votes continued to be counted in the days after Election Day in 2020 he and other advisers told former President Donald Trump that the odds of him winning the election were “5 to 10%."

Stepien also said that his assessment at the time was that things were looking “very, very, very bleak.”

Stepien continued, “So as the week wore on, as we paid attention to those numbers, every single — multiple times a day, you know, internally, you know, I was feeling less confident for sure.” 

On the tape, Stepien was then asked, “What was your view on the state of the election at that point?”

“You know, very, very, very bleak. You know, I, we told him, the group that went over there, outlined, you know, my belief in, in chances for success at this point and then we pegged it at, you know, 5, maybe, maybe, 10% based on recounts that were, you know, either were automatically initiated or could be initiated based on, you know, realistic legal challenges, not all the legal challenges that eventually were pursued,” Stepien said. 

“My belief was that it was a very, very — 5 to 10% is not a very good, optimistic outlook,” Stepien said. 

Stepien did not appear in person before the committee on Monday after his wife went into labor, but the committee showed video from Stepien’s previous closed-door deposition. 

As the House Jan. 6 committee’s hearing plays out this morning, the White House is continuing to watch and monitor closely. 

However, as far as President Biden himself is concerned, White House officials do not intend on the President weighing in on the day-to-day, more incremental developments of the committee’s hearings. Instead, the hope is that when Biden does weigh in, those moments are more reserved for significant developments in the hearings, according to a source familiar with the White House’s thinking. 

The bigger context here is that there are certain things that White House officials want to be careful to try to avoid – including the perception that the White House is injecting politics into an ongoing congressional investigation, as well as handing former President Donald Trump and his allies more ammunition to accuse Biden and his team of politicizing the Jan. 6 committee’s work. (All of this, of course, doesn’t mean that there’s no chance that we see Biden – when confronted with questions from reporters in the coming days and weeks – engage on the topic of the Jan. 6 hearings more than his aides would like.)

Asked last week whether he had watched that day’s hearing, Biden shrugged as he told CNN's Kevin Liptak that he “didn’t have time” to do so.