Didn’t ‘want to be a winner by cheating’: Ariz. Trump backer

Rusty Bowers looked and sounded every bit the rockribbed conservative Republican that he is when he appeared Tuesday at the Jan. 6 committee hearing on Capitol Hill.

Sitting ramrod straight, the Arizona House speaker said he voted twice for former President Donald Trump and wanted to do everything in his power to help the MAGA leader win the 2020 election.

But he could not go back on his oath to uphold the Constitution or reject the votes of the people of Arizona.

“I [did] not want to be a winner by cheating,” Bowers said.

Trump trashed Bowers moments before the hearing started as “the latest RINO,” or Republican in Name Only, to “play along with the committee.”

The former president also asserted that Bowers agreed with him that the election in Arizona was “rigged” and that he actually won.

Bowers emphatically said Trump’s claim was a bald-faced lie.

“Anywhere, anyone, at any time, who said that I said the election was rigged, that would not be true,” Bowers said.

Bowers proved to be the latest conservative Republican to become a star witness in the Democratic-led committee’s dramatic indictment of Trump’s plot to overturn the election.

The God-fearing adherent of former President Ronald Reagan said he was appalled by the scheme led by Trump with the help of lawyers Rudy Giuliani and right-wing law Prof. John Eastman to bully him into enacting a fake slate of pro-Trump electors.

Bowers said he repeatedly pleaded with Giuliani to produce a shred of evidence to back up his claims that undocumented immigrants and dead people voted in the elections.

But there was none. He rejected Eastman’s outrageous call to reject the certified results of the election that President Biden won, asking Eastman to give him a valid legal rationale for the unprecedented action.

“Just do it and let the courts sort it out,” Bowers recalled Eastman telling him.