Jan. 6 committee holds fourth hearing

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers told the Jan. 6 House select committee that former Trump attorney John Eastman asked him to "decertify the electors" — and Bowers refused.

Bowers said it would be "counter to my oath." 

"He said 'well ... my suggestion would be just do it and let the courts figure it all out. And he didn't use that exact phrase, but that was what he, his meaning was. And I declined, and I believe that was close to the end of our phone call," Bowers said.

Bowers also said he told former President Donald Trump a few days earlier that he would not do anything illegal for him.

The House select committee played new video on Tuesday of Jacob Chansley, the so-called “QAnon Shaman,” which Rep. Adam Schiff said showed him "illegally" entering the Arizona state Capitol building before Jan. 6, 2021, and refusing to leave.

The video, according Schiff, is meant to highlight how individuals tied to the riot on January 6 were tied to prior incidents at state capitols across the country.

In the video, Chansley stood at the front of a small crowd in the same distinct outfit he wore to the US Capitol on Jan. 6. Chansley pointed forward and appeared to shout.

Chansley pleaded guilty in September to a felony charge for obstructing the Electoral College proceedings at the US Capitol on Jan. 6. He was sentenced to 41 months in prison. 

He has not been charged in connection with protests at the Arizona state Capitol.

Pictures of Chansley at the US Capitol went viral because of his bizarre appearance while leading others through the Capitol, shouting into a bullhorn.

As one of the first 30 rioters inside the building, he made his way to the Senate dais that was hastily vacated earlier by then-Vice President Mike Pence, and left a note that read, "It's Only A Matter Of Time. Justice Is Coming!" according to his plea documents.

Rep. Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican, urged Arizona GOP House Speaker Rusty Bowers to throw out Biden electors and replace them with Trump electors on the morning of Jan. 6.

Bowers told the House Select Committee on Tuesday that Biggs called him the morning of Jan. 6 asking him to sign a letter from his state and support the decertification of Arizona’s electors.

“He asked if I would sign on both to a letter that had been sent from my state and/or that I would support the decertification of the electors,” Bowers said. “And I said I would not.”

Biggs was one of several Republican members of Congress who took part in former President Donald Trump's efforts to try to overturn the election. Rep. Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, connected the White House with Pennsylvania state legislators as well as a Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who embraced Trump’s false claims of fraud.

The call Bowers received from Biggs, which had not been previously disclosed, came after he had already been pressured both by Trump and Trump attorney John Eastman, who put forward the theory to throw out electors in states Trump lost.

Rep. Adam Schiff, who was questioning Bowers, pointed to a statement Bowers released on Dec. 4, 2020, saying that Trump and Rudy Giuliani had come to Arizona making a “breathtaking request” for the state legislature to overturn the election results.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers told the Jan. 6 committee that Rudy Giuliani and former President Trump were asking him for things that go "against my oath."

Bowers said Trump and his allies had asked him for two things during a phone call: one was to hold an official committee hearing at the Capitol "so that they could hear this evidence and we could take action hereafter." He said Giuliani never provided evidence of voting fraud and Bowers refused to allow the hearing because he didn't want to be part of "the circus" and didn't "want to be used as a pawn."

Bowers said Giuliani's second request was to remove electors of President Joe Biden and replace them. "I said, that's totally new to me. I've never heard of any such thing," Bowers told the committee during his testimony as he recounted the moment.

"I said look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it, and I also swore to the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona," Bowers said. "This is totally foreign as an idea or a theory, to me, and I would never do anything of such magnitude without deep consultation with qualified attorneys."

Bowers said that the requests not only went against his oath, but also went against his "most basic foundational beliefs."

"There was no evidence being presented of any strength," he said. "Anything that would say to me you have a doubt, deny your oath. I will not do that," he added.

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Cleta Mitchell, who advised former President Donald Trump’s legal team after the 2020 election, told the Jan. 6 committee that there were discussions about legislators being able to overturn the election results around the time of the 2020 election.

“Right after the election, it might have been before the election,” Mitchell said, according to video of her deposition played during the committee hearing.

In a Nov. 5, 2020, email that Mitchell sent to Trump attorney John Eastman, she asked Eastman: “What would you think of producing a legal memo outlining the constitutional role of state legislators in designating electors?” 

The email was previously disclosed by the committee in court filings.

In a video during the hearing, the committee showed testimony and new materials detailing the extent of the pressure campaign against state legislative leaders that played out in key states that Trump lost, including Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Michigan State Senate Majority leader Mike Shirkey, in video of his deposition, recalled a conversation he had with Trump where he told the former President, “We were going to follow the law.”

Shirkey said he remembered receiving 4,000 text messages in a short period of time from Trump supporters calling for action to change the state’s electors.

“They were believing things that were untrue,” Shirkey said.

The committee played audio of a voicemail from a Trump campaign official telling representatives, “You do have the power to reclaim your authority to send a slate of electors that will support President Trump and Vice President Pence.”

Rusty Bowers, a Republican and Arizona state House speaker, testified before the committee that key Trump ally Rudy Giuliani said he had evidence of widespread voter fraud, but "never" provided it.

Bowers, who is a witness at today's hearing, described a phone call he took with former President Donald Trump and Giuliani in which Giuliani claimed to have evidence of fraud.

Bowers said he asked Giuliani "on multiple occasions" for proof of the fraud allegations.

"He said that they did have proof," Bowers said, describing the exchange. "I asked him, 'Do you have names?'" He told committee members Giuliani said that he did and would provide them to him.

But ultimately, according to Bowers, that didn't happen.

Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff asked Bowers, "Did you ever receive from him that evidence, either during the call, after the call, or to this day?"

Bowers replied simply: "Never."

The Arizona House speaker also told the committee that during another conversation with him, Giuliani said, “we've got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”

“I don't know if that was a gaffe or maybe he didn't think through what he said, but both myself and others … remembered that specifically, and afterwards, we kind of laughed about it,” he said.

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Josh Roselman, investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 House select committee, outlined how people in former President Trump's circle incessantly called state officials in an effort to block the election results prior to the 2021 attack on the Capitol.

In late 2020, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman and other Trump associates started to send messages — sometimes daily — to Republican state lawmakers asking them to discuss the election and urging them to give their electoral votes to Trump.

Trump's allies made phone calls, sent texts and left voicemails to push the baseless claim that state legislators could overturn the election outcome.

"He posted multiple messages on Facebook listing the contact information for state officials and urging his supporters to contact them to quote, "demand a vote on the decertification.' In one of those posts, President Trump disclosed [Michigan State Sen.] Mike Shirkey's personal phone number to his millions of followers," Roselman said.

Pennsylvania State Speaker Bryan Cutler said Giuliani repeatedly tried to reach out to him, and longtime Trump political adviser Steve Bannon announced protests at Cutler's office and home.

During the first protest, Cutler said his teen son was home alone.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers said under oath Tuesday that former President Donald Trump lied about him in a press release that came out shortly before the hearing, where Trump claimed that Bowers told him that he believed the 2020 election was rigged.

Rusty Bowers directly refuted portions of a statement released earlier this afternoon by the former president, testifying under oath that he never referred to the 2020 election as rigged to "anyone, anywhere, anytime." 

Trump’s statement said: “In November 2020, Bowers thanked me for getting him elected. He said he would have lost, and in fact expected to lose, if I hadn’t come along. During the conversation, he told me that the election was rigged and that I won Arizona… Bowers should hope there’s not a tape of the conversation.”

Bowers was asked about Trump's statement by Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, and said his counselor had called to read it to him by phone shortly before the hearing began. 

"There are parts of it that are true, there are parts of it that are not true," Bowers told Schiff.

“…Anywhere, anyone anytime who has said that I said the election was rigged – that would not be true,” he continued.

The back-and-forth harkens back to Trump’s infamous conversations with former FBI Director James Comey in 2017, where Trump lied about what they discussed and raised the specter of “tapes.”

Like Bowers, Comey testified to Congress, under penalty of perjury, about the conversations with Trump.

Rusty Bowers, a Republican and Arizona state House speaker, is testifying now about former President Donald Trump's pressure on state officials to overturn Joe Biden's victory in 2020.

Bowers, who supported Trump's reelection bid in 2020, refused to bow to intimidation and attempts to get him to back efforts in the legislature to decertify Biden's victory in Arizona.

He previously described how Trump and the then-President's lawyer Rudy Giuliani called him after the 2020 election to convince him to somehow involve the legislature in the state's certification process before sending its presidential electors to Congress.

This past year, Bowers also shot down some of his fellow Arizona Republicans' more extreme election ideas, including a resolution of mostly debunked claims of fraud that called for the election results to be set aside in three Arizona counties.

In February, the Republican speaker used a parliamentary maneuver to effectively doom a GOP bill which would have overhauled elections in Arizona, including by giving the state legislature the power to reject election results it didn't like.