Former Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia called then-President Trump in December 2020 to tell him he should concede the election.
Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, said he phoned Trump after the Electoral College had certified its votes establishing Biden’s victory.
“I told him that I did believe, yes, that once those legal processes were run, if fraud had not been established … I believed that what had to be done was concede the outcome,” Eugene Scalia said in a video released as part of a Tuesday hearing by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
The committee in various hearings has focused on how members of Trump’s Cabinet urged him to accept the results of the 2020 presidential election. It has also discussed conversations at the time about using the 25th Amendment to the Constitution to remove Trump from office.
Multiple other former Trump White House officials also told the committee that the Dec. 14, 2020, meeting of the Electoral College signaled to them that the election was over and President Biden had won.
Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone told the committee he believed Trump should have conceded at a certain point, and he told the committee that former chief of staff Mark Meadows shared a similar sentiment with him.
“Dec. 14 was the day that the states certified their votes and sent them to Congress, and my view of that was the end of the matter,” former Attorney General William Barr said. “I thought this would lead inexorably to a new administration.”
Former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told the committee she began to plan for life after the administration at that point.
Ivanka Trump, a former senior White House adviser and former President Trump’s daughter, said she viewed the Electoral College meeting as an important day in the course of planning for life after the election.
And Judd Deere, a former deputy press secretary, testified to the committee that he told Trump he believed the window to pursue litigation had closed once the Electoral College sent its votes to Congress.
Asked about the former president’s response, Deere said he “disagreed.”