Trump Campaign Manager Didn't Testify At Jan. 6 Hearing Due To Family Emergency

Bill Stepien, Donald Trump ’s 2020 campaign manager, did not appear at Monday’s public hearing due to a family emergency, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot announced.

“His counsel will appear and make a statement on the record,” an advisory by the Jan. 6 committee reads.

Kevin Marino, Stepien’s lawyer, confirmed the “family emergency” mentioned in the announcement is referring to Stepien’s wife going into labor.

“Mr. Stepien was in town and preparing for his testimony here today in response to a subpoena when he got a call that his wife had gone into labor,” Marino told reporters. “He notified committee council and he immediately headed to hospital to be with her.”

As a result, the public hearing was delayed by over 45 minutes.

Instead of a live appearance, the committee showed footage of Stepien’s previous testimony during the hearing.

“As you know Mr. Stepien has appeared previously, and so we’ll be able to provide the American people with a lot of interesting, new, and important information that Mr. Stepien’s provided to us previously,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice-chair, told CNN ’s Manu Raju ahead of the hearing.

Monday’s hearing illustrated the lengths to which Trump went to claim the election was stolen even though he knew this was false.

Stepien was subpoeaned by the House panel in November 2021 along with other Trump officials, including Jason Miller, a senior advisor to Trump’s 2020 campaign. The committee said Stepien “supervised the conversion of the Trump presidential campaign to an effort focused on ‘Stop the Steal’ messaging and related fundraising.”

“That messaging 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,” the House panel continued.

The committee aired clips of Stepien’s taped deposition in which he said he and other campaign aides told Trump he said say it was too early to call the race rather than declaring victory, but that the then-president ignored their advice.

“He thought I was wrong,” Stepien said in the deposition. “He told me so that he was going to go in a different direction.”

During Thursday’s hearing , the committee aired part of Miller’s testimony acknowledging Trump’s campaign staff told the former president he lost the 2020 president election. Miller detailed an incident where Matt Oczkowski, Trump’s campaign internal data expert, held a call with Trump in the days following the election, telling Trump he had lost, based on the reported results.

“I remember he delivered to the president pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose,” Miller told the committee.

Stepien currently works as an advisor to Harriet Hageman, who is challenging Cheney in Wyoming. He was scheduled to testify at Monday’s hearing along with Ben Ginsberg, a Republican attorney who is considered an expert on elections, and Chris Stirewalt , a former Fox News political editor.

All major news networks, including Fox News this time, aired the hearing live .