Has the Select Committee investigating the insurrection and Trump's attempted coup, invited Mo Brooks in for a talk yet? He says they haven't. They should. And so should the Department of Justice. After Trump saw his self-trumpeted reputation as a brilliant candidate handicapper circling the drain, he unceremoniously dumped Brooks as his endorsee. Since Brooks' campaign was based on basically nothing but Trump's endorsement, he looked at his own career being flushed right down the toilet-- and decided to get even. He almost immediately released a statement implicating Trump in... well, what some would call treason. I mean, basically, Brooks was saying that Trump wasn't just whining about losing the election... he was seeking help to overturn the U.S. government.
Brooks wrote that "Trump asked me to rescind the 2020 elections, immediately remove Joe Biden from the White House, immediately put President Trump back in the White House, and hold a new special election for the presidency. As a lawyer, I’ve repeatedly advised President Trump that January 6 was the final election contest verdict and neither the U.S. Constitution nor the U.S. Code permit what President Trump asks. Period." Later in the day, Brooks said Trump had made the request of him on "multiple occasions" since Sept. 1, 2021.
In their reporting yesterday, Luke Broadwater and Shane Goldmacher noted that this "marked the first time a lawmaker who was involved in Trump’s attempts to invalidate his election defeat has said that Trump asked for actions that, were they possible, would violate federal law.
Brooks said Trump brought up the matter to him repeatedly over the past six months. He said he had initially hoped the requests were not connected to his endorsement in the Senate race, but now believes that Trump was dangling public support of Brooks’s candidacy as leverage to try to get a new election.
“I hoped not but you’ve seen what happened today,” Brooks said in a text. “For emphasis, the conversations about Jan. 6, 2021 being the only 2020 remedy have been going off and on for 6+ months.”
“I know what the legal remedy for a contested presidential election is,” he continued. “There is one and only one per the Constitution and U. S. Code and it occurs on the first Jan. 6 after each presidential election. Period. Game over after January 6.”
Brooks’s high-profile break with Trump raised the possibility that he might cooperate with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, providing information the panel has so far been unable to secure about what Trump told his allies in Congress before, during and after the riot. Other Republicans involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election-- Representatives Jim Jordan of Ohio and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania-- have refused requests from the panel for interviews.
Brooks did not immediately respond to further questions. In his statement, he said he had fought on behalf of Trump “between Nov. 3 and Jan. 6”-- “when it counted.”
On Dec. 21, 2020, Brooks and other House Republicans met with Trump at the White House to discuss plans to object to the election. On Jan. 6, he wore body armor as he addressed the throng of Trump supporters who gathered at the Ellipse near the White House, telling them to “start taking down names and kicking ass.”
“Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?” Brooks said, prodding the crowd to cheer more loudly. “Will you fight for America?”
In an essay for Politico today, Why Trump Is Losing His Grip on the GOP, John Harris wrote that "Journalists and biographers have yet to find a chapter in Trump’s 75 years when he might be described as honest in the conventional sense of that word-- someone who tells the truth and follows the rules because it is the right thing to do, even when it is disadvantageous to do so. But just because Trump is someone who is comfortable lying-- anyone paying attention has known that since the 1980s-- he was not at the outset of his political career defined by artifice. His grandiose self-conception, his vanity, his gleeful satyriasis-- these are common traits in politicians, but most would try to hide them from view. Trump put them proudly on display... Trump has moved from being the beneficiary of America’s instinctual suspicion that most politicians are phonies who don’t really believe a thing they say, to being the enforcer against politicians who are insufficiently phony in professing blind devotion to him... 'Every hero becomes a bore at last,' wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson-- and he might have added that they become a phony, as well."