Years before becoming House speaker, Republican Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana played a leading role aiding Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
That history will be on display Friday, with Johnson set to deliver remarks alongside the former president about “election integrity” – a phrase Trump often uses to describe the lie that the 2020 election was rigged and unfounded concerns about future mass voter fraud.
Johnson carved out an influential role after the 2020 election, helping Trump’s attempts to subvert the will of the people and overturn the legitimate results. Many of his actions took place behind-the-scenes or didn’t break through beyond his Louisiana district, while more prominent pro-Trump figures soaked up the post-election attention.
Like many Republicans, he questioned the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory and raised concerns about the expansion of mail-in voting during the Covid-19 pandemic. His gripes echoed longstanding, garden-variety GOP complaints about mail-in voting, which largely ignore the reality that there is a staggeringly tiny level of fraud in US elections.
But he also promoted perhaps the most farfetched conspiracy theory bouncing around at the time: that two voting technology companies, Smartmatic and Dominion Voting Systems, flipped millions of votes from Trump to Biden as part of an international plot.
“The allegations about these voting machines, some of them being rigged with this software by Dominion, there’s a lot of merit to that,” Johnson told a Louisiana radio station in November 2020, adding, that there was “a software system that was used all around the country, that is suspect because it came from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.”
These claims were false. Dominion and Smartmatic later filed defamation…
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