Explaining on Tuesday why he refused to succumb to a months-long campaign of pressure from former President Donald Trump and his allies to cancel the 2020 election, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican long since he voted for Trump and has said he would vote for him again, he told The House Committee investigated on Jan. 6 that “I don’t want to be a winner by cheating.”
“I will not play by the laws I swore allegiance to,” said the 69-year-old Mormon, a father of seven as his voice broke and his eyes filled with tears. “I will never go any further [God] in the wilderness of life, knowing that I am asking for this guide just to show me a coward in defending the course that led me to take it?
Bowers was the first of several witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing to detail Trump’s efforts and his inner circle to undo the former president’s loss in the 2020 election by pressuring state officials to subvert voter will and present fake voter list.
The committee has previously described Trump’s “seven-part plan” to stay in power as a “seditious conspiracy.”
Arizona State House Speaker Rusty Bowers. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
According to Bowers, Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani called him shortly after the 2020 election and together they urged him to start a process in the Arizona state legislature to “eliminate President Biden voters and replace them.” the “by voters loyal to Trump.
But neither Trump nor anyone around him ever provided Bowers with evidence to support his claim that Trump lost Arizona because of fraudulent votes.
“We have a lot of theories, but we don’t have the evidence,” Giuliani finally admitted, according to Bowers, after Bowers repeatedly insisted on getting details about what Giuliani claimed were hundreds of thousands of ballots issued by undocumented immigrants and dead people. . .
In the absence of such evidence, Bowers said he told Trump, Giuliani and others that he “would not do anything contrary to [the] oath that I swore in the Constitution “, but they kept pushing him anyway.
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“I didn’t want to be used as a pawn,” Bowers explained.
Under oath, Bowers also directly refuted Trump’s assertion on Tuesday that Bowers accepted during his initial November 2020 conversation that “the election was rigged and I won Arizona.”
Bowers testifying before select committee on Tuesday. (Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty Images)
“I had a conversation with the president, and that’s certainly not it,” Bowers said. “[If] anywhere, anyone, anytime he said I said the election was rigged, that wouldn’t be true. “
In many ways, Arizona was the starting point for Trump’s alleged plot to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. The presidential race was so close, with Biden winning by just over 10,000 votes, the most thin of any state, which became a source of controversy and confusion as soon as Fox News called him for Biden election night. In the months that followed, Trump and his allies repeatedly challenged Arizona’s outcome in court, to no avail. A controversial Republican “audit” of allegations of election fraud in Maricopa County finally found that Biden’s margin was larger, not smaller, than previously thought.
Bowers stood firm throughout. After his calls with Trump and Giuliani, Bowers said Tuesday, Trump’s attorney, John Eastman, called on the phone and asked him again to “vote … to decertify.” [Biden’s] voters ”. And again, Bowers refused.
“Are you asking me to do something that has never been done in the history of the United States and … pass my state without enough evidence?” Bowers objected.
“Do it and get the court to rule it out,” was how Bowers characterized Eastman’s response.
Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers is embraced by select committee vice president Liz Cheney. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)
Unlike the two Republican members of the Jan. 6 committee: Wyoming MP Liz Cheney and Illinois MP Adam Kinzinger, Bowers could hardly be considered the so-called Never Trumper. In an interview with the Associated Press on Monday, the Arizona House spokesman reaffirmed that he voted for Trump in 2020 and would gladly do the same in 2024.
“If he’s the candidate, if he faced Biden, he would vote for him again,” Bowers said. “Just because what he did the first time, before COVID, was really good for the county. From my point of view, it was great.”
However, Bowers never exploded. On Dec. 4, he issued a public statement stating that while he “worked hard to re-elect” Trump, “he cannot and will not accept a suggestion that we are violating current law to change the outcome of a certified election.”
A few months later, the Arizona Patriotic Party launched a retreat effort against Bowers. “They’ve come to my house and intimidated our family and our neighborhood,” Bowers said at the time, describing how “vile” mobile trucks called him a pedophile out loud.
The withdrawal effort eventually failed, but Bowers said Tuesday that he and his family now have “a new pattern in our lives to worry about what will happen on Saturdays” as a result of Trump supporters, some of whom which have been armed, “arguing.” [with and] threatening … the neighbors and myself “.
Despite this personal rejection, Bowers used an unusual parliamentary maneuver in January 2022 to kill a bill that would have revised the Arizona election, giving the state legislature the power to reject election results.
A few months later, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Foundation named Bowers one of the five recipients of its annual Profile in Courage Award.
“I am very grateful for this honor, but I can’t help but feel that I don’t deserve it,” Bowers said in a statement. “Honoring my oath and the election of the people at the polls are not heroic acts: they are the least that Arizona people should expect from the people chosen to serve them.”