A former top assistant told congressional investigators that U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado was involved in the “early phases” of negotiations with senior White House officials that eventually led to moves by former President Donald Trump and his allies to decertify the 2020 election results.
Boebert was one of a small group of Republican lawmakers who met with Meadows as early as the last week of November 2020 to “raise the idea” of former Vice President Mike Pence intervening to prevent the certification of election results by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, a former assistant to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. The following day, a mob of Trump supporters attacked the US Capitol, killing five people and leading to Trump’s second impeachment trial.
In evidence before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol in February, Hutchinson named Boebert. Parts of her testimony were made public this week as part of a legal filing by the committee’s lawyers in response to Meadows’ lawsuit seeking to stop several subpoenas.
Hutchinson recalled multiple conversations in the weeks following Thanksgiving in which “campaign leaders and a few members of Congress” discussed the idea of Pence assisting an effort to overturn the election results on Jan. 6.
“Mr. Scott Perry, Mr. Jim Jordan… Ms. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Lauren Boebert are the four members that immediately jump out to me,” Hutchinson said.
“I recall those individuals being involved in the earlier stages at this time,” she added. “I’m sure there were other individuals involved, but those are ones that I remember specifically being involved that Mr. Meadows had an outreach to.”
Boebert, a divisive first-term legislator from Silt, has been criticized for giving tours of the Capitol to a “large group” of people the day before the insurgency and for sending tweets that some interpreted as relaying “intelligence” about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s whereabouts during the attack. “Today is 1776,” she tweeted on Jan. 6 morning.
Hutchinson also claimed that “Ms. Ellis” was among the Trump campaign employees who met with Meadows early on about the matter, implying that she was referring to Colorado attorney Jenna Ellis, a legal adviser to the Trump campaign. According to ABC News, Ellis wrote a document to Meadows on Dec. 31, 2020, in which she claimed Pence had the power to overturn the election.
The argument that vice-presidents have any authority to influence the counting of electoral votes in the congressional certification process has been overwhelmingly rejected by constitutional scholars, and conspiracy theories alleging widespread fraud in the 2020 election have been thoroughly debunked by state and local officials, experts, law enforcement authorities, and the courts.
