Trump spox pushes election fraud disinformation during Jan 6 hearing

• During the Jan. 6 hearing, Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington pushed bogus election-fraud claims.
• It was an example of counter-programming while the committee laid out a case against Trump.
• They detailed links between the fraud claims and the insurrection, linking it to Trump personally.

Liz Harrington, a spokesperson for former President Donald Trump, tweeted out election fraud disinformation during the January 6 committee’s first public hearings Thursday.

The claims — which did not directly engage with what was said in the hearings — were for hours the only response from a Trump representative to the hearings.

Trump himself responded on Friday morning, attacking the committee and also referring to the disproved fraud claims via his Truth Social app.

“They didn’t want to talk about voter fraud then, and they don’t want to talk about it now,” tweeted Harrington, after pushing a series of misleading claims she said indicated voter fraud during the 2020 election in several swing states. 

—Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) June 10, 2022

In her thread, Harrington sought to argue the voter-fraud claims which helped animate the rioters on January 6, 2021, were indeed true — not noting that all her arguments have already been debunked.

In the tweets, she referenced allegations by Trump allies of so-called “ballot harvesting” in Wisconsin during the 2020 election, or using an absentee ballot to register a vote for someone else. 

Spectrum News reported that at a March meeting where a pro-Trump group pushed the claims, one supporter admitted the group had no evidence the technique had been used illegally or to register fake votes. 

She also referenced so-called “ballot harvesting” cases in Arizona, in which a local elections official was convicted of breaking an election law in a case Trump allies have attempted to leverage to falsely cast doubt on the integrity of the whole election. 

Trump on his Truth Social app ahead of the hearings said that the protests which preceded the attack on the Capitol represented the “the greatest movement in the history of our Country.” In a message on the app early Friday, Trump criticised the committee.

“So the Unselect Committee of political HACKS refuses to play any of the many positive witnesses and statements, refuses to talk of the Election Fraud and Irregularities that took place on a massive scale,” Trump wrote. “Our Country is in such trouble!”

The committee in the hearing claimed that Trump had launched his campaign to overturn the election on the basis of voter fraud claims top officials, including Attorney General Bill Barr, had told him were false.

The conspiracy theories fueled the attacks on the Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to halt Joe Biden’s certification as president. 

Trump and his allies have continued to relentlessly promote the claims.