A surveillance video then-President Donald Trump’s lawyer played for Georgia lawmakers in December 2020 purportedly revealing ballot-counting irregularities at Atlanta’s State Farm Arena showed nothing illegal, former U.S. Attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak told a congressional committee Monday.
Testifying on the second day of hearings before the U.S. House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Pak said his office investigated the video at the request of then-Attorney General Bill Barr.
The request came one day after former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, played the video during a state Senate hearing on alleged voter fraud during Georgia’s 2020 presidential election.
“We found that the suitcase full of ballots … being seen pulled from under a table was actually an official lockbox where ballots were kept safe,” Pak testified. “Nothing irregular happened in the counting [of votes], and the allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false.”
Pak, a Republican appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia by Trump, appeared on a panel with two other witnesses who likewise discounted allegations of voter fraud hurled by Trump after he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden.
Former Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, also a Republican, testified that after he publicly dismissed allegations of voter fraud in his city, he and his family received death threats on from people angered by tweets posted by Trump targeting Schmidt.
Prominent Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg told committee members that post-election reviews of lawsuits Trump supporters brought in each of six battleground states including Georgia found all but one had been dismissed. The lone exception was a case that did not affect the outcome of the election, Ginsberg said.
In the Georgia case, Richard Donoghue, who was serving as acting deputy attorney general at the time the State Farm allegations surfaced, indicated in video testimony Monday that his office also determined they were false and reported those findings to Trump.
Pak resigned from the Justice Department in early January of last year, shortly before Biden took the oath of office as president.
The Jan. 6 committee is scheduled to hold five additional hearings in the next two weeks. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is expected to appear at the fifth of the seven sessions.
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.