Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers (L), Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (C), and chief operating officer for the Georgia Secretary of State Gabriel Sterling arrive to testify before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol in the Cannon House Office Building on June 21, 2022 in Washington, D.C.
Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani privately admitted that the 45th president’s legal team had “lots of theories” about 2020 election fraud but no “evidence” to support a scheme to replace Joe Biden’s electors with Trump’s electors in states Trump lost, the Jan. 6 Committee heard in explosive testimony on Tuesday.
Dissecting former President Donald Trump’s pressure campaign to reverse his defeat in Georgia, the Jan. 6 Committee on Tuesday called prominent Republicans he targeted in two states: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and voting systems manager Gabriel Sterling.
Rounding out the first panel was Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, another Republican who resisted Trump’s effort to overturn his 2020 electoral defeat.
In emotional testimony, Bowers testified that Giuliani asked him to replace Arizona’s electors from Joe Biden’s victory with illegitimate pro-Trump electors and that the suggestion offended him to the core.
“It’s a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired — of my most basic, foundational beliefs,” Bowers said. “And so for me to do that because someone asked me to is foreign to my very being. I will not do it.”
Bowers said that Giuliani acknowledged that he had no basis for such an action.
As Bowers recalls it, Giuliani said: “We’ve got lots of theories; we just don’t have the evidence.”
Bowers said that he did not know whether it was a “gaffe” or if Giuliani just didn’t think it through, but he said he and other witnesses in his group recalled that comment.
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Legal experts have opined that knowledge will be a crucial prong of any possible prosecution of Trump or his loyalists.
Jan. 6 Committee’s Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) drew a line between the previous hearing investigating Trump’s targeting of his ex-vice president Mike Pence and those against other officials across the country.
“In fact, pressuring public servants into betraying their oath was a fundamental part of the playbook,” Thompson said. “And a handful of election officials in several key states stood between Donald Trump and the upending of American democracy.”
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a key prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment, called Trump’s lie of election fraud “a dangerous cancer on the body politic.”
“If you can convince Americans that they cannot trust their own elections, that anytime they lose it is somehow illegitimate, then what is left but violence to determine who should govern?”
In a separate panel will be Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, a former election worker who sued Rudy Giuliani and others for allegedly targeting her in a smear campaign so vicious that it forced her to change her appearance and go into hiding. Moss is a winner of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
The hearing is ongoing.
(Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
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