The list of witnesses for the second day of the Jan. 6 hearings Monday includes William Stepien, Donald Trump’s campaign manager for the 2020 presidential election, it was announced on Sunday.
Other witnesses include Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News editor, who was part of the team that made the decision to call Arizona for eventual election winner Joe Biden in November 2020. The decision reportedly infuriated Trump, who reached out directly to Fox News leadership to complain. Stirewalt has become an outspoken critic of political media since leaving the network.
“Americans gorge themselves daily on empty informational calories, indulging their sugar fixes of self-affirming half-truths and even outright lies,” he wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed three weeks after the Capitol riots. “Can anyone really be surprised that the problem has gotten worse in the last few years?”
After a brief intermission, a second panel will testify including conservative election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg, former U.S. district attorney B.J. Pak and former Republican Philadelphia city commissioner AJ Schmidt. Pak testified this past August that he was told by Justice Department officials that he would be fired if he did not find evidence that Biden’s election victory in Georgia, where Pak held jurisdiction, was fraudulent.
Schmidt has also testified in Congress that he and his family had received public threats following the 2020 election, particularly after Trump falsely tweeted that he “refuses to look at the mountain of corruption & dishonesty” surrounding the Pennsylvania election results.
As outlined during the hearings’ opening statement by Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, the second day of the hearings aims to prove that Trump, despite knowing that he had lost the election and that the results were legitimate, “engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information.” It is the first of three days of hearings set to take place this week, all of which are expected to be held during the day with the Monday hearing beginning at 10 a.m. ET.