Former Trump campaign manager to testify before Jan. 6 committee on Monday

Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien will testify Monday before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Stepien will be joined by other witnesses for the week’s first hearing that include former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt, former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia BJay Pak, conservative election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg and Al Schmidt, the former city commissioner of Philadelphia, according to an announcement by the committee.

The Jan. 6 committee, which held its first public hearing on the Capitol attack in prime time on Thursday, is gearing up for daytime hearings this week on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Lawmakers say they will tell a comprehensive narrative that places Trump at the center of the attack and show he is culpable for the rioting.

Stepien was first subpoenaed by the committee last November.

He is a longtime GOP operative who replaced Brad Parscale as Trump’s campaign manager in the months leading up to the 2020 election. Stepien was involved in the Trump campaign’s efforts to mount legal challenges to vote totals in several states he lost that year.

Stepien worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and later served as White House political director.

The committee’s focus on Stepien includes his participation in the “Stop the Steal” effort, including fundraising and messaging that “included the promotion of certain false claims related to voting machines despite an internal campaign memo in which campaign staff determined that such claims were false.” 

Stepien is now helping the campaign of Harriet Hageman, according to Politico. She is challenging Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair and one of two Republicans who sit on the Jan. 6 committee.

Stirewalt is a former top editor at Fox News who made the decision to call Arizona in favor of Biden on election night. 

In an interview on Friday, Stirewalt said he hopes the hearings will allow people to be “clear eyed and sturdy footed knowing that we can keep our constitutional system in place.”

“This is the first time in the history of the country that we really threatened the peaceful transfer of power,” he said. “We need to make sure that doesn’t happen in 2024.” 

The committee will also be hearing from Schmidt, a Republican election official in Philadelphia who drew Trump’s ire after he refused to say the 2020 election was rigged or rife with fraud. He stepped down from his post as city commissioner last year after receiving death threats.

Pak, the first Korean American to become a U.S. attorney, resigned from his Atlanta post just days before the Jan. 6 rioting. Georgia became a focus of Trump’s efforts and the former president is alleged to have pressured election leaders there to overturn the election results in his favor.

Ginsberg is a conservative election lawyer and political law expert with over 38 years of experience in the field. He is also a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University’s center in Washington, D.C.

Ginsberg was previously a co-chair of the bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan group that works to improve election administration. He’s also written op-eds in newspapers criticizing claims of election fraud in the 2020 election, including in The New York Times.

Updated at 5:03 p.m.