In a hearing on Monday, the panel highlighted fund-raising solicitations sent by Mr. Trump’s campaign committees in the weeks after the election, seeking donations for an “Official Election Defense Fund” that the Trump team claimed would be used to fight what they asserted without evidence was rampant voter fraud favoring candidate Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“The select committee discovered no such fund existed,” a committee investigator said in a video shown at the hearing. It cast the fund as a marketing gimmick being used to bilk Mr. Trump’s supporters.
It was an especially cynical endeavor, according to the committee, because Mr. Trump and his allies knew his claims of a stolen election were false. Yet they continued using fund-raising appeals to spread that falsehood, and to raise money that the committee suggested was paid to Mr. Trump’s business, and groups run by his allies.
Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat who led the committee’s presentation on Mr. Trump’s fund-raising, suggested that his allies continued their futile legal challenges to the election because they needed to justify their fund-raising.
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