Republicans’ plot to overthrow Biden election laid bare
Rioters who smashed their way into the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, succeeded — at least temporarily — in delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s election to the White House.
Hours before, Representative Jim Jordan had been trying to achieve the same thing.
Texting with then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, a close ally and friend, at nearly midnight on January 5, Jordan offered a legal rationale for what President Donald Trump was publicly demanding — that Vice President Mike Pence, presiding over the electoral count, somehow assert the authority to reject electors from Biden-won states.
Pence “should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all”, Jordan wrote.
“I have pushed for this,” Meadows replied. “Not sure it is going to happen.”
The text exchange is in a batch of startling evidence that shows the deep involvement of some House Republicans in Trump’s desperate attempt to stay in power. A review of the evidence finds new details about how, long before the attack on the Capitol unfolded, several Republican lawmakers were participating directly in Trump’s campaign to reverse the election results.
Members of the House January 6 committee are preparing to launch public hearings in June connecting the Republicans plotting with Trump and the rioters who attacked the Capitol.
“It appears a significant number of House members and a few senators had more than just a passing role in what went on,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chair of the January 6 committee.
The January 6 panel has been slowly gaining new details about what lawmakers said and did in the weeks before the insurrection. Members have asked three GOP lawmakers — Jordan of Ohio, Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California — to testify voluntarily. All have refused. Others could be called in the coming days.
So far, the January 6 committee has refrained from issuing subpoenas to lawmakers, fearing the repercussions of such an extraordinary step. But the lack of cooperation hasn’t prevented the panel from obtaining new information about their actions.
The latest court document, submitted in response to a lawsuit from Meadows, contained excerpts from a handful of the more than 930 interviews the January 6 panel has conducted. It includes information on several high-level meetings nearly a dozen House Republicans attended where Trump’s allies flirted with ways to give him another term.
Among the ideas: naming fake slates of electors in seven swing states, declaring martial law and seizing voting machines. The efforts started in the weeks after Biden was declared president-elect by the Associated Press.
In early December 2020, several lawmakers attended a meeting in the White House counsel’s office where attorneys for the president advised them that a plan to put up an alternate slate of electors declaring Trump the winner was not “legally sound”. Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania pushed back on that position. So did GOP Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida and Louie Gohmert of Texas, according to testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former special assistant in the Trump White House.
Despite the warning from the counsel’s office, Trump’s allies moved forward. On December 14, 2020, as rightly chosen Democratic electors in seven states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — met at their seat of state government to cast their votes, the fake electors gathered as well.
They declared themselves the rightful electors and submitted false Electoral College certificates declaring Trump the true winner of the presidential election in their states. Those certificates from the “alternate electors” were then sent to Congress, where they were ignored.
The majority of the lawmakers have since denied their involvement in these efforts.
Pressure from lawmakers and the White House on the Justice Department is among several areas of inquiry in the January 6 investigation.
Representative Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the panel from Maryland, has hinted there are more revelations to come. When the results of the panel’s investigation come out, Raskin predicted, “America will see how the coup and insurrection converged.”