That included $100 million in the first week, as fundraising emails urged donors to contribute to an “Election Defense Fund.” No such fund existed, campaign aides told the select committee. Monday’s hearing didn’t absolve his other aides of blame either, however, as lawmakers showed that Trump campaign officials used fraud claims - that they apparently called wrong in private - to raise more than $250 million in the weeks following the Nov. He sought to replace the leadership of the Justice Department for the same reason - only to back down amid a mass resignation threat. He elbowed aside his campaign legal team in favor of the Giuliani-Powell effort after they refused to validate his fraud allegations. Trump’s aides characterized him as increasingly cloistered within a shrinking group of advisers willing to push his claims, while he ostracized so-called Team Normal. “I felt that after the election … he wasn’t listening to advice from me.” And while you sometimes had to engage in a big wrestling match with him, it was possible to keep things on track,” Barr recalled. “Before the election it was possible to talk sense to the president. The committee also spun its debunking attempts forward to more recent disinformation efforts, airing a lengthy clip of Barr dismantling the premise of the recently released film “2,000 Mules,” which Trump touted as the long-elusive evidence of 2020 election fraud. Those claims included: that a suitcase of ballots seen on camera in Georgia’s State Farm Arena was evidence of fraud, that thousands of dead people voted in multiple states and that Dominion voting machines were shifting votes from Trump to Joe Biden. Instead, they privately told the then-president he was wrong and counseled him to back off some of the more extreme claims. Most of the aides did not speak out publicly on their attempts to quell Trump’s efforts, even as the lies grew more pronounced and were accepted by swaths of voters. Morgan, the campaign counsel, described in another video how outside lawyers who had signed up to help on Election Day “disengaged with the campaign,” in part because “law firms were not comfortable making the arguments that Rudy Giuliani was making publicly.”
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