A guide to the biggest moments in the Jan. 6 hearings so far

When these hearings started, it was an open question how often, and how clearly, Trump’s advisers told him he had lost. Plenty of times, the committee has demonstrated. Former attorney general William P. Barr said he told the president that various allegations of widespread fraud were easily debunked, and the idea the election was stolen was “bullshit.” “I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, ‘Boy, if he really believes this stuff, he has … become detached from reality,’” Barr testified. He said he resigned in part because Trump wasn’t listening to him.

“He thought the election had been stolen or was corrupt and that there was widespread fraud,” testified Barr’s successor as attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen. “And I had told him that our reviews had not shown that to be the case.”

By December, after the electoral college confirmed Joe Biden’s win, White House officials said they told Trump to concede.

Yet Trump consistently turned away from the facts and kept inquiring about various routes to staying in power. A small group of lawyers and outside advisers were willing to give him some ideas — like seizing voting machines or declaring martial law — even as they themselves acknowledged they didn’t have the evidence to back up their fraud claims, and that their plans were probably illegal.

In mid-December, this culminated in an “unhinged” six-hour meeting in the White House between Trump advisers and his outside lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. Trump sat through it all and eventually appeared to side with the conspiracy theorists. Then he started rallying his supporters to come to D.C. on Jan. 6. “Be there, will be wild,” he said in a tweet sent hours after that meeting.

“Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by arguing he is willfully blind,” committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) warned.