Election Stunt

Josh Hawley Is Lying About His Election Stunt

The Missouri senator claims he wasn’t trying to overturn the election results. Really?

TIM MURPHY

Josh Hawley isn’t sorry about challenging the result of the 2020 election. In an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju on Friday, the Republican senator from Missouri attempted to defend his actions in the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, accusing his critics of distorting his words and unfairly villainizing him.

When he challenged the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win in the Senate and voted to reject the results of the election in Arizona and Pennsylvania, Hawley explained Friday, he merely “gave voice” to Missourians who were concerned about allegations of fraud. “I was very clear from the beginning that I was never attempting to overturn the election,” he said.

That is just false. Let’s roll the tape.

On November 6, Hawley appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to call out “deeply disturbing” allegations of election malfeasance by Democrats. “We’ve seen reports in Detroit about ballots brought in there, new ballots in the middle of the night,” Hawley said. “We’ve seen it in Philadelphia.” (Hawley believed these rumors demanded serious investigation, though had he investigated them on Google he would have learned that what was being unloaded in the middle of the night in Detroit was camera equipment.) 

By December 1, Hawley was objecting to fast-tracking the confirmation process on Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees on the grounds that no one could say for sure who the president would be. It would be rash, he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, to do so “before this election has been certified, before the Electoral College has even met, while there are important appeals and legal cases ongoing, including the one involving Pennsylvania that I hope the U.S. Supreme Court will hear.” At least four times in that interview he raised doubts that Biden would actually be sworn in—”if Joe Biden ends up being sworn in as president,” he said; “If Joe Biden ends up as president,” he said; “If Joe Biden—if he is president come January,” he said; “should he actually be sworn in as president,” he said.

That Pennsylvania lawsuit—which called for all ballots cast by mail in the state to be thrown out, in an attempt to overturn the election result in the state through mass disenfranchisement—was rejected by the Supreme Court. When Missouri’s attorney general filed an amicus brief in support of another effort to throw out Pennsylvania’s election results (along with the results of three other states), Hawley cheered that on too. 

Four days after Texas’ Pennsylvania challenge was thrown out (by, among other people, Chief Justice John Roberts, whom Hawley once clerked for), and one day after the Electoral College itself met to formally make Biden president-elect, the result of the election, was still just a known unknown to Josh Hawley.