Mike Johnson, an unsung enabler of Trump’s last-ditch effort, privately urged his colleagues to oppose the election results the day before the attack on the Capitol.
One day before a mob bludgeoned its way into the Capitol, Rep. Mike Johnson huddled with colleagues in a closed-door meeting about Congress’ task on Jan. 6, 2021.
A relatively junior House Republican at the time, Johnson was nevertheless the leading voice in support of a fateful position: that the GOP should rally around Donald Trump and object to counting electoral votes submitted by at least a handful of states won by Joe Biden.
“This is a very weighty decision. All of us have prayed for God’s discernment. I know I’ve prayed for each of you individually,” Johnson said at the meeting, according to a record of his comments obtained by POLITICO, before urging his fellow Republicans to join him in opposing the results.
A review of the chaotic weeks between Trump’s defeat at the polls on Nov. 3, 2020, and the Jan. 6 Capitol attack shows that Johnson led the way in shaping legal arguments that became gospel among GOP lawmakers who sought to derail Biden’s path to the White House — even after all but the most extreme options had elapsed.
As Trump’s legal challenges faltered, Johnson consistently spread a singular message: It’s not over yet. And when Texas filed a last-ditch lawsuit against four states on Dec. 8, 2020, seeking to invalidate their presidential election results and throw out millions of ballots, Johnson quickly revealed he would be helming an effort to support it with a brief signed by members of Congress.
Throughout that period, Johnson was routinely in touch with Trump, even more so than many of his more recognizable colleagues.
Some of Johnson’s vocal opponents at the Jan. 5, 2021, closed-door meeting were Reps. Chip Roy (R-Texas) and Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who warned Johnson’s plan would lead to a constitutional and political catastrophe.
“Let us not turn the last firewall for liberty we have remaining on its head in a bit of populist rage for political expediency,” Roy said at the time, according to the record.
Nearly three years later, on Wednesday afternoon, Roy and Bacon cast two of the unanimous House GOP votes to make Johnson the next speaker.
Johnson declined to comment Wednesday when asked about his involvement in events leading up to Jan. 6, telling reporters that “we will talk about all these things in detail” and added: “I’ve covered it many times over the last couple of years.” After his election as speaker, Johnson also did not respond to shouted questions from reporters about the 2020 election.
Johnson’s rise to the speakership in some ways shows that colleagues like Roy, Bacon and Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) — who sharply rejected Johnson’s arguments at the time — have made peace with Johnson’s role in the election-objection effort and the national reckoning that has ensued.
Buck opposed two other candidates for speaker, Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in part because they had refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, but he made an exception for Johnson.
Buck told reporters Wednesday that Johnson’s “amicus brief is fundamentally different than trying to overturn something on the floor.” Going through the courts was “absolutely appropriate,” according to Buck, who noted that “most of the conference voted to decertify the election.”
Buck didn’t acknowledge Johnson’s role in advocating for the objections in the conference, including during the impassioned Jan. 5 conference meeting.
Until Johnson’s unlikely bid for the speakership, his involvement in Trump’s bid to remain in power despite losing the 2020 election had largely avoided attention, overshadowed by his more visible colleagues — like Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Jordan — who more actively strategized with the outgoing president. Johnson wasn’t among the six Republican lawmakers subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 select committee, and he earned just one passing mention in its final report.
But a review of his closed-door comments and public statements at the time reveal the newly elected speaker as a ubiquitous contact for Trump at key moments, within days of the former president’s defeat at the polls and throughout his increasingly desperate effort to subvert the 2020 election.
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On the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, the day after Johnson’s contentious remarks at the conference meeting, he led a statement with 36 colleagues, defending their decision to lodge objections to electoral votes from multiple states.
“Our extraordinary republic has endured for nearly two and a half centuries based on the consent of the governed,” he wrote. “That consent is grounded in the confidence of our people in the legitimacy of our institutions of government. Among our most fundamental institutions is the system of free and fair elections we rely upon, and any erosion in that foundation jeopardizes the stability of our republic.”
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The new speaker embraced Trump's 2020 election gambit at every turn https://t.co/fthdx99KoQ
— POLITICO (@politico) October 25, 2023
People are digging up quotes of Mike Johnson pushing vote-fraud lies. But what makes Johnson really scary is how polished he is in creating plausible sounding legal arguments, not his dabbling in Rudy inky-forehead conspiracy nuttiness.
He's not Vulgar MAGA. He's Refined MAGA.
— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) October 25, 2023
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