CNN anchor and analyst Chris Wallace said the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol is attempting to paint former President Trump as a “loser” desperate to hold on to power following his loss in the 2020 election.
“If they’re successful today, and obviously to Trump supporters nothing they say may be successful, but if they’re successful in putting the lie to the big lie, then suddenly Trump is not an aggrieved party,” Wallace said during CNN’s coverage of Monday’s second hearing of the committee.
“He’s simply a loser, in a naked grab for power and willing to overturn the judgement of 150 million American voters and say that he won when he didn’t win.”
For the second time, Wallace was a member of CNN’s team of analysts covering the highly anticipated congressional hearings.
He was hired by the network late last year to host a show on its streaming channel, which has since been shut down. Executives at CNN have said Wallace will continue to host a talk show that will air on Sunday evenings on CNN and on HBO Max, which is owned by the cable giant’s new parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Wallace, who spent decades as Fox News’s top political anchor and news pundit, has said he left Fox after the 2020 election because working there had become “unsustainable.” He has specifically taken issue with some of the claims made by the network’s top opinions hosts about the Capitol attack and coronavirus pandemic.
“There was never a chance that they were going to find enough votes to switch,” Wallace said Monday in reference to Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results through recounts and lawsuits.
“It’s what Bill Barr said: It wasn’t that ‘if there was fraud,’ it was, ‘was there fraud on the dimensions that would actually reverse the outcome of the election?’ And there never was a chance of that,” Wallace said.