The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection revealed new evidence Thursday that former President Donald Trump had a premeditated plan — devised before any votes had been counted, to declare victory no matter what the election results were.

“We also interviewed Brad Parscale, President Trump’s former campaign manager. He told us he understood that President Trump planned as early as July that he would say he won the election, even if he lost,” Lofgren added. 

The evidence presented Thursday includes video from the committee’s deposition of former Vice President Mike Pence’s Counsel, Greg Jacob, during which Jacob describes how he and Pence’s then-chief of staff Marc Short prepared for Trump to declare victory on Election Night, regardless of the results.

“Marc had indicated to me that there was a possibility that there would be a declaration of victory within the White House that some might push for – and this is prior to the election results being known – and he was trying to figure out a way of avoiding the Vice President sort of being thrust into a position of needing to opine on that when he might not have sufficient information to do so,” Jacob says in the video clip.

After this conversation on Nov. 3, 2020, Jacob drafted a memo to Short, which the committee said it obtained from the National Archives and presented for the first time on Thursday. 

“ … it is essential that the Vice President not be perceived by the public as having decided questions concerning disputed electoral votes prior to the full development of all relevant facts,” the memo reads.

More of the committee's revelations: The committee also revealed an email conservative legal activist Tom Fitton sent to two Trump advisers a few days before the election that contains a draft statement for Trump to declare victory on election night. 

The draft prepared statement, sent to Trump aides Molly Michael and Dan Scavino on Oct. 31, 2020, declares: “We had an election today, and I won.”

It also emphasizes that only the votes “counted by the Election Day deadline” would matter, even though the former President was aware that vote counting would lawfully continue past election day. Another email from Fitton to Michael and Scavino that day notes that he “just talked to him about the draft below,” an apparent reference to Trump himself. 

Trump was warned by advisers on Election Night that it was “far too early to make any proclamation” of victory, according to video of the former President’s then-campaign manager Bill Stepien that was presented by the committee, but went ahead and declared victory anyway.