The committee delayed the start of its second hearing after its star witness for the day, Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien, canceled due to a family emergency.

The committee’s first daytime hearing was derailed after Stepien’s wife went into labor Monday morning. His counsel will appear and make a statement on the record instead, according to The Hill.

Stepien was compelled to appear under a subpoena, and it is not clear how much information he was willing to give. A committee aide alluded to that point by declining to answer a pre-hearing question about how cooperative Stepien was expected to be.

He would have been the day’s star witness as the committee sought to show to what extent Trump was told he didn’t have the numbers to win, portraying his refusal to accept the numbers as “the big lie”.

The committee was expected to ask Stepien about Trump’s thinking when repeatedly told he had lost the election as well as how his claims of election fraud were used to fundraise.

Representative Bernie Thompson (D-MS), the chairman of the House committee, said he was “not sure” if Stepien would make up his appearance at a later date.

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