Mike Johnson backs away from Trump’s 2020 claims, says he isn’t election denier

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Speaker Mike Johnson firmly backed away from the idea that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election in a new interview that aired on Sunday, a move that is almost certain to draw the former president’s ire.

The House GOP leader, who was elected to his position last year after the downfall of Kevin McCarthy and the failure of any members of GOP leadership to secure enough votes to become speaker, appeared for an interview with CBS’s Margaret Brennan, recorded last week during his trip to the US-Mexico border. In the interview, he rejected the label of “election denier” and argued that not all of the Republicans who signed on to an effort to invalidate the election results in several states fit that bill.

Mr Johnson, at the time, was a relatively new member of the House. In late 2020, more than 100 Republican elected officials in Congress signed on to an amicus brief filed to the Supreme Court arguing that voting results in four key battleground states should be invalidated due to changes those states made to their election laws in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The Supreme Court did not take up their cause and rejected the Trump campaign’s lawsuit seeking that outcome.

Now, the Speaker of the House says that Joe Biden was “certified” the victor of the 2020 election — a careful acknowledgement of reality that leaves some small room for supposed concerns about the election’s validity.

“President Biden was certified as the winner of the election, he took the oath of office, he’s been the president for three years,” he said.

That statement alone, though merely a representation of fact, itself breaks from the reality that Donald Trump has tried to spin since January 2021. The former president maintained for months that he would be “reinstated” as president and that his lawyers were active in fighting that battle — two statements that ended up being untrue.

The speaker also addressed his concerns about the 2020 election, stating that “the Constitution was violated in the run up to the 2020 election.”

“[N]ot always in bad faith, but in the aftermath of Covid, many states changed their election laws in ways that violated that plain language. That’s just a fact,” he said, stating an opinion that has not been recognised by the conservative-controlled Supreme Court or any other serious legal authority.

That language is far and away from what Donald Trump and his allies have been pushing for years.

Mr Trump’s complaints about the 2020 election — made at campaign rallies, during TV interviews, and in other settings — had nothing to do with state election laws. The former president has argued, from the very beginning, that he was the victim of election fraud: His attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was recently found liable for a massive defamation judgment after he falsely smeared two women in Georgia as being involved in such efforts. The argument that state election laws broadening the use of mail-in ballots has long been an afterthought in the former president’s overall campaign to persuade his supporters that the 2020 election was plagued by millions of illegal ballots.

Perhaps the clearest evidence can be found in Mr Trump’s 2021 phone call with top Georgia officials including the state’s elections chief; in that conversation, now a crucial piece of evidence in his two prosecutions over the matter as well as the House of Representatives investigation into January 6, Mr Trump did not raise concerns about Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger expanding access to mail-in ballots during the pandemic. Instead, he asked the official to “find” more than 10,000 votes to surreptitiously add to his total.

Mr Johnson on Sunday announced to House Republicans that he had reached a deal on government spending for fiscal year 2024 with congressional Democrats led by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The topline framework announced by congressional leaders largely avoids some of the more drastic spending cuts that House conservatives had previously sought.