Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol/Chapter 1/Section 1.4
1.4 PRESIDENT TRUMP'S LAUNCH OF THE BIG LIE
Consistent with the pre-election narrative planted by President Trump, within hours of polls closing, President Trump began pushing the claim that late-reported vote tallies were illegitimate.[40] Even though he had been reminded by his Campaign Manager that very day that a large number of mail-in ballots would not be counted for several hours or days,[41] President Trump claimed that Democrats were going to "find … ballots at four o'clock in the morning and add them to the list."[42] He also suggested that Democrats were continuing to vote after the polls had closed.[43]
Indeed, this is exactly what Steve Bannon described when he said President Trump would "take advantage" of the Democrats' "natural disadvantage" on election night.[44]
In the ensuing days and weeks, President Trump often referred to "dumps" of votes that were injected into the counting process.[45] His supporters latched onto these false claims.[46] There were no "dumps" of votes—just tallies of absentee ballots as they were reported by jurisdictions throughout the country in a fully transparent process.[47] These batches of ballots included votes for both Trump and Biden. The late-reported votes favored the former Vice President, just as President Trump's campaign advisors said they would, particularly in primarily Democratic cities.[48]
Attorney General Bill Barr recognized immediately that the "Red Mirage" was the basis for President Trump's erroneous claim of fraud. "[R]ight out of the box on election night, the President claimed that there was major fraud underway," Barr said. "I mean, this happened, as far as I could tell, before there was actually any potential of looking at evidence."[49] President Trump's claim "seemed to be based on the dynamic that, at the end of the evening, a lot of Democratic votes came in which changed the vote counts in certain states, and that seemed to be the basis for this broad claim that there was major fraud."[50]
President Trump knew about the Red Mirage. He chose to lie about it repeatedly—even after being directly informed that his claims were false. This was often the case in the post-election period. The President consciously disregarded facts that did not support his Big Lie.