The House select committee investigating the January 6th U.S. Capitol attacks revealed Thursday that Tom Fitton, the leader of a far-right group known for filing frivolous lawsuits, worked with then-president Donald Trump to develop a strategy of falsely declaring victory in the 2020 election before a single ballot had been counted.
Despite never having been an attorney, Fitton and his group Judicial Watch have been active in reactionary legal circles for decades, especially during Trump’s single term when the Judicial Watch head became one of many fringe figures who dramatically elevated their position in the Republican Party.
The Judicial Watch chief remains a strong influence on the ex-president and has been one of Trump’s key advisers on how to deal with the National Archives and Records Administration’s efforts to retrieve official government documents which Trump took with him after leaving office.
Delivering prepared remarks at a Thursday hearing of the House committee, Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) revealed two email messages sent by Fitton to Trump White House officials in which he discussed a strategy of preemptively declaring victory based solely on votes that would be cast on November 3, 2020, that year’s Election Day.
In the weeks before the election in which Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump, numerous political and election experts predicted that Trump would appear to have a “Red Mirage” victory on Election Day even though he was still expected to lose based on public opinion surveys which consistently showed Biden ahead in most key states. In the leadup to the election, Trump had urged his supporters to avoid voting by mail which he falsely claimed was more prone to fraud. Biden and other Democrats had urged their supporters to vote by mail in order to avoid contracting Covid-19, which was killing thousands of Americans a day at the time.
Evidence and testimony provided by the select committee has shown that Trump privately knew he had lost to Biden but that he was being advised by far-right allies and advisers not to concede. Fitton was among those extremist activists promoting false theories about voting machines and switched ballots.
Days before the election, on Oct. 31, Fitton emailed White House officials a draft speech for Trump to deliver in which he would declare that “we had an election today — and I won.” Fitton advised Trump to pretend that there was an “Election Day deadline” for counting votes, even though no state has ever had such a requirement.
“Everyone knew that ballot counting would lawfully continue past Election Day,” Lofgren said. “Claiming that the counting on Election Night must stop before millions of votes had been counted was, as we now know, a key part of President Trump’s premeditated plan.”