Jan. 6 committee holds second hearing

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.

Donald Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon testified that Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro accused him of being an agent of the "deep state" after Cannon dismissed various 2020 election fraud claims.

But there's no evidence from Navarro — who refused to cooperate with the select committee's subpoena — saying that he can't violate Trump's executive privilege.

He was arrested last week on contempt of Congress charges.

Navarro's next court appearance is Friday, but he's so far argued that he was mistreated by the FBI upon his arrest at Reagan National Airport and denied a post-arrest phone call. The FBI, on the other hand, say Navarro had wanted to call the media, rather than an attorney.

The FBI also says Navarro called the arresting officers "kind Nazis."

In a video played at today's hearing, former Attorney General Bill Barr said he thought that he would be fired after telling the Associated Press that there was no widespread election fraud that would change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

Here's what Barr said in the clip:

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, had this to say before playing the clip of the former attorney general: "Barr told the Associated Press on December 1, that there was no evidence of election fraud and immediately after Attorney General Barr's statement went public, Mr. Trump berated and he nearly fired Barr, but Barr persisted in telling the President that there was no evidence to support the fraud claims."

The AP published a story on Dec. 1 with the headline: Disputing Trump, Barr says no widespread election fraud

Some of then-President Donald Trump’s top aides were deeply uncomfortable with the conspiracy theories that his outside advisers were pushing about the 2020 election, according to new testimony revealed Monday at the Jan. 6 committee hearing. 

In a videotaped deposition, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner said he opposed Rudy Giuliani’s post-election activities, though based on Kushner’s own description of his pushback, it did not sound all that forceful. 

Some lawyers who had been helping the Trump campaign also balked at what was happening. 

“I had conversations with probably all of our counsel who are signed up to assist on election day…. the general consensus was that the law firms were not comfortable making the arguments that Rudy Giuliani was making publicly,” Trump campaign general counsel Matt Morgan said in a videotaped deposition, a portion of which was played by the committee. 

This dynamic was reported in real time, with some prominent GOP lawyers steering clear of the more unhinged voter-fraud claims emanating from Trump’s orbit. One major law firm that was involved in a Republican-backed lawsuit put out a statement in November 2020, distancing itself from Trump’s legal strategy, and another law firm that represented the Trump campaign in a Pennsylvania case abruptly withdrew after Trump ramped up his election lies.