Republican Who Held Back Tears Testifying On Trump Trying to Steal the Election Says He’d Vote For Trump Again

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Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican who refused to go along with former President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, said that he would support him were he to run in 2024.

“If he is the nominee, if he was up against [Joe] Biden, I’d vote for him again,” he told the Associated Press on Monday in an interview published on Tuesday. “Simply because what he did the first time, before COVID, was so good for the county. In my view it was great.”

The interview was ahead of his Tuesday testimony before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol. During the hearing, Bowers gave powerful testimony that included recalling being asked by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to overturn the election results in Arizona, which Biden won.

He said, “Well, we have heard by an official high up in the Republican legislature that there is a legal theory or a legal ability in Arizona that you can remove the electors of President Biden and replace them. And we would like to have the legitimate opportunity through the committee to come to that end and remove that.” And I said, that’s totally new to me. I’ve never heard of any such thing.

And he pressed that point and I said, ‘Look, you are asking me to do something that is counter to my oath when I swore to the Constitution to uphold it and I also swore to the Constitution and the laws of the state of Arizona and this is totally foreign as an idea or a theory to me, and I would never do anything of such magnitude without deep consultation with qualified attorneys. And I said I’ve got some good attorneys and I’m going to give you their names. But you’re asking me to do something against my oath and I will not break my oath.

Becoming emotional, Bowers also remarked that “on more than one occasion throughout all this, that has been brought up, and it is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired of my most basic foundational believes. And so for me to do that, because somebody just asked me to, is foreign to my very being. I will not do it.”

Additionally, Bowers refuted Trump’s statement ahead of the hearing that said that Bowers told Trump “that the election was rigged and that I won Arizona.”

“Anywhere, anyone, anytime has said I said the election was rigged, that would not be true,” Bowers told the committee.

Bowers also said he refused an offer by Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) to sign onto a letter calling for the Arizona electoral results to be decertified.