We’re still learning new things about what happened on Jan. 6, and each one suggests there’s a lot more damning intel to be found. There’s a new piece by The Washington Post about Tommy Tuberville, the college football coach-turned-senator, who, on his first full day on the job, was one of 13 Republican senators who voted against the certification of now-president Joe Biden’s election. And among the details are this: Tuberville also sneaked away to a closet for a meeting with other senators looking to jeopardize democracy.
After the mob of violent Trump supporters broke into the Capitol building, sending congress members into hiding, Tuberville joined the likes of Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and other GOP senators in a storage closet inside a bunker, hiding not only from the mob but from their colleagues. It was a mix of die hard Trumpists, the like the Texas senator whose wife Trump had called “ugly,” and more reasonable Republicans, who were worried that voting against Biden’s certification after rioters inspired by their words had infiltrated the Capitol might look bad:
“There were 12 of us gathered to talk about what happens now [and] where do things go from here,” said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.).
The mood was “very heavy,” remembered Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.).
“I do remember saying we have to pull the country together,” said Lankford, “We are so exceptionally divided that it’s spilling into the building.”
“I didn’t really listen to them,” Tuberville said about the closet colloquy.
Tuberville recalls that some senators had a change of heart, deciding to abandon the plan to try and overturn an election based on insufficient or even nonexistent evidence. He was not one of them. Why did Tuberville vote against certification, thus ensuring his name would forever be connected to that infamous day?
“I wasn’t voting for me, I was voting for the people of Alabama,” Tuberville told The Post. “President Trump has an 80-percent approval there. I told them, ‘I’m going to vote how you want me to vote.’” (Also, Trump helped get him elected.)
Since that day, Tuberville has not gone full Trump firebrand, like Cruz or Hawley or like fellow first year congresspeople Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Crowther. But he also says he has “no regrets” about that day, and even appeared at a rally in August with Trump, where he claimed, without proof, that Biden’s win was part of the “most corrupt election in American history.”
(Via Washington Post)
Source: https://uproxx.com/viral/ted-cruz-josh-hawley-jan-6-plot-in-closet/