Perry tied to text on subverting election
Former governor allegedly sent a message to Meadows about ignoring the will of voters
WASHINGTON — Former Gov. Rick Perry allegedly sent a text to former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff the day after the 2020 election suggesting that at least three state legislatures ignore the will of their voters and send their states’ electors to re-elect Trump, CNN reported Friday.
“HERE’s an AGRESSIVE (sic) STRATEGY: Why can t (sic) the states of GA NC PENN and other R controlled state houses declare this is BS (where conflicts and election not called that night) and just send their own electors to vote and have it go to the SCOTUS,” said the text revealed this week by the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
CNN reported that members of the committee believe the former Energy Department secretary sent the text to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, whom the House this week voted to hold in criminal contempt of Congress.
Multiple people who know Perry confirmed the phone number the committee has associated with that text is Perry’s number, CNN reported, and that the number appears in databases as registered to a James Richard Perry, the former governor’s full name, of Texas.
A Perry spokesman said the former governor denies sending the text, according to CNN. Attempts by the Houston Chronicle to reach him were not successful late Friday.
With the revelation of the text, Perry has now been implicated in both scandals that led to Trump’s two impeachments.
Perry, who left the Trump administration in 2019, was one of several senior administration officials who Democrats said knew about and approved of Trump’s attempt to “use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election” when Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to announce investigations into Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump was impeached for the call in 2019.
Perry’s text is also the latest example of his devotion to Trump, whom the former governor during the 2016 Republican primary labeled “a cancer on conservatism” that “must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”
But by 2019, Perry declared Trump to be God’s “chosen one” to lead the nation, comparing the president to several Old Testament kings.
“God used imperfect people all through history,” he said in an interview with Fox News at the time. “King David wasn’t perfect, Saul wasn’t perfect, Solomon wasn’t perfect.”
Perry has largely kept quiet since leaving the Energy Department in 2019. This year, he led a nearly hourlong news conference at the Texas Capitol trying to convince state leaders to buy a brand of air filtration products from a company — Houston-based Integrated Viral Protection — that he acknowledged he has “a part” in.
Perry is now among a handful of Texans who may be targeted by the committee probing the Capitol riot.
CNN reported in August that the committee requested that telecommunications companies preserve the phone records of a handful of GOP lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Tyler Republican who is retiring from Congress to run for state attorney general.
Gohmert last December sued Vice President Mike Pence to try to force him to take control of the election certification process and keep Trump in office.
“He may count elector votes certified by a state’s executive, or he can prefer a competing slate of duly qualified electors,” Gohmert wrote in the lawsuit. “That is the power bestowed upon him by the Constitution.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, meanwhile, led a separate failed lawsuit seeking to overturn election results in four battleground states that went for Biden. Paxton also spoke briefly at Trump’s rally outside the White House on Jan. 6, just before the insurrection.
Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, meanwhile, led an effort in the Senate to delay certifying Trump’s loss and objected to Arizona’s electoral votes less than an hour before demonstrators breached the building. Seventeen of 25 Texas Republicans in the House objected to counting Electoral College votes for Biden later that night.