Bill Barr on ‘rubbish’ Philly fraud claims, Al Schmidt recalls threats: More Pa. highlights at Jan. 6 hearings

With testimony from a prominent former Philadelphia elections official and detailed references to false conspiracy theories about Pennsylvania’s vote, the state remained in the spotlight Monday as the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol attack convened its second public hearing.

Pennsylvania came up again and again as a frequent target of former President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen election. And witnesses shed new light on efforts to debunk his falsehoods about the state, as the committee sought to demonstrate that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election but continued to mislead the American people.

“It all comes down to the numbers,” the committee’s chairman, U.S. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) said in his opening remarks. “The numbers tell you the winner and the loser. … Those numbers aren’t just numbers. They’re votes. They’re your votes. They’re the will and the voice of the American people.”

Here are some of the key Pennsylvania moments from the hearing.

Al Schmidt, a former top GOP elections official in Philadelphia, was one of a string of Trump advisers and other Republicans featured Monday, as the committee sought to highlight Trump’s persistence in spreading election lies well after he’d been told there was no evidence to support them.

In his case, Schmidt told the panel, Trump’s obstinance led to threats of violence.

Schmidt, who stepped down as an elected city commissioner earlier this year, shared death threats he received after Trump targeted him by name in a tweet eight days after the 2020 vote. Trump called him a “RINO” — a Republican In Name Only — and “a disaster” for failing to uncover “massive election fraud and irregularities that took place in Philadelphia.”

“Heads on spikes. Treasonous Schmidts,” read one message sent to a member of Schmidt’s family that threatened to fatally shoot them and their children. A screenshot of the menacing missive was displayed during his testimony.

“The threats prior to that tweet … were pretty general in nature,” Schmidt testified. But after Trump’s tweet, he said, “the threats became much more specific, much more graphic.”

Schmidt has been a vocal defender of the legitimacy of elections since the 2020 vote and has broken with his party on numerous occasions to call out Trump’s false claims of fraud.

No Republican officials in Pennsylvania have supported him.

He’s discussed the threats before, calling the behavior of some Trump supporters “very deranged.” But his testimony Monday highlighted a crucial point as the committee lays out its case: Trump’s power to incite violence with a single tweet.

The committee has sought to draw similar links between Trump’s tweets before his Jan. 6 rally in Washington and the attack on the Capitol later that day.

The Justice Department investigated “an avalanche” of fraud allegations in Pennsylvania and mostly found they were “absolutely rubbish,” former Attorney General Bill Barr said in a taped deposition testimony played by the committee.

But despite efforts by him and other department officials to make that clear to Trump, Barr said, the former president refused to listen.

“There were so many of these allegations that when you’d give him a very direct answer on one of them, he wouldn’t fight us on it, but he’d move on to another,” said Richard Donoghue, who served as acting attorney general after Barr’s resignation.

In his deposition testimony, Barr cited a claim oft-repeated by Trump supporters and GOP lawmakers in the state that there were more people who voted in Philadelphia in 2020 than there were registered voters.

“That was absolutely rubbish,” he told committee investigators. “The turnout in Philadelphia was absolutely in line with the rest of Pennsylvania. … There was nothing strange about the Philadelphia turnout.”

» READ MORE: Scott Perry, Philly Proud Boys, and more: Pa. had a starring role in the first Jan. 6 committee hearing

Many of the false claims about Pennsylvania’s 2020 vote aired Monday still make the rounds in Republican election denialism circles to this day. Each was fully investigated and found to be false by elections officials or the FBI.

Schmidt cited one claim that some 8,000 ballots had been cast in the names of dead voters. But investigators, he said, couldn’t even find eight instances of that happening.

“We took seriously every case that was referred to us,” Schmidt said, “no matter how fantastical, no matter how absurd.”

Donoghue referenced claims by Jesse Richard Morgan, a York County U.S. Postal Service contractor, who said after the election that he’d been tasked with driving a truck full of completed mail ballots from New York to Pennsylvania.

In a rambling account laid out in an affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit by Republican lawmakers in 2020, Morgan offered little more than a series of vague suspicions that led him to believe a man named “Buffalo Bill” had loaded his truck with thousands of fraudulent ballots. He said he assumed they were bound for Philadelphia based on a theory his mother floated while discussing her skepticism about Pennsylvania’s election results.

It is not uncommon for absentee ballots to arrive from out of state. And elections administrators have dismissed many of the events Morgan describes as routine.

Barr previously told The Inquirer that former U.S. Attorney Bill McSwain, the top federal prosecutor in Philadelphia at the time, “was in the thick of investigating stuff, with me prodding them along.”

But in the end, Donoghue said in the deposition clips played Monday, “we looked at both ends — both the people who loaded the truck and the people who unloaded the truck — and that allegation was not supported by the evidence.”

Hours after the hearing, Trump released a 12-page statement calling the proceedings a “kangaroo court” and reiterating many of the discredited election fraud claims that Barr and others debunked during the hearing and earlier.

Philadelphia prosecutors have said Morgan’s story was part of what motivated a Virginia man to drive hundreds of miles in November 2020 to the Convention Center in a Hummer emblazoned with QAnon stickers and loaded with guns. The man, Joshua Macias, sent a text shortly before his arrest on weapons charges referring to a “truckload of fake ballots.”

But Macias, founder of the group Vets for Trump, was in the news again Monday due to a cameo appearance in the Jan. 6 committee’s first hearing last week.

On Thursday, the committee released clips of a meeting between Macias, then-Proud Boys chairman Enrique Tarrio, and Stewart Rhodes, head of the right-wing militant group Oathkeepers, that took place in Washington the day before the Capitol attack. Investigators have pointed to it as evidence of possible collusion between the extremist groups accused of organizing and fomenting the violence on Jan. 6.

At the time of that encounter, Macias was out on bail from his earlier weapons charges in Philadelphia. On Monday, District Attorney Larry Krasner cited the video in urging the judge in Macias’ case to hold him in contempt of court for violating his bail conditions.

“We need to radically reconsider whether Joshua Macias is a midsize fish or a shark,” Krasner said at a news conference. “He has proven how dangerous he can be. … This is a startling revelation.”

Both State Sen. Doug Mastriano, now the Republican nominee for Pennsylvania governor, and McSwain were also referenced in Monday’s proceedings.

Barr, in his deposition, recounted asking McSwain in the aftermath of the 2020 election to explain an allegation about discrepancies in Pennsylvania absentee ballots that was making the rounds in Republican circles — one that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani raised during a hearing on the election Mastriano convened in Gettysburg.

Barr said McSwain cited Mastriano as the source of incorrect information.

“He said the problem was Mastriano threw out this number and what he did was mix apples and oranges,” Barr said. “He took the number of applications for the Republican primary and he compared it to the number of absentee votes cast in the general election.”

» READ MORE: A timeline of Doug Mastriano's election denialism

Mastriano handily won last months’ Republican primary with Trump’s endorsement. McSwain finished third after Trump called him a “coward” and said he “did absolutely nothing” to investigate fraud claims.

Mastriano’s attorney confirmed earlier this month that he had provided documents under subpoena by the committee and agreed to be interviewed about his postelection efforts in Pennsylvania, and his participation in the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the Capitol attack.

Mastriano on Monday announced that he has hired attorney Jenna Ellis, who served on Trump’s legal team, as his campaign’s senior legal adviser.

Ellis is also under subpoena for documents and testimony from the committee.