New House Speaker Mike Johnson played leading role in effort to overturn 2020 election

Washington: If Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio was the most prominent public face of the congressional effort to fight the results of the 2020 election, his mentee, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, was a silent but pivotal partner.

Now, Johnson, 51, is House Speaker, and new attention is focused on his behind-the-scenes role in attempting to overturn the election results on behalf of former President Donald Trump.

A social conservative, Johnson played a leading role in recruiting House Republicans to sign a legal brief supporting a lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.

In December 2020, Johnson collected signatures for a legal brief in support of a Texas lawsuit attempting to throw out the results in four battleground states won by Joe Biden.

The Supreme Court ultimately rejected the suit, but not before Johnson persuaded more than 60 per cent of House Republicans to sign onto the effort. He did so by telling them the initiative had been personally blessed by Trump and the former president was “anxiously awaiting” to see who in Congress would step up to the plate to defend him.

A constitutional lawyer, Johnson also was a key architect of Republicans’ objections to certifying Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021. Many Republicans in Congress relied on his arguments.

On the eve of the January 6 votes, he presented colleagues with arguments they could use to oppose the will of the voters without embracing conspiracy theories and the lies of widespread fraud pushed by Trump. Johnson instead faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional.

After a mob of Trump’s supporters, believing the election was rigged, stormed the Capitol on January 6, injuring about 150 police officers, Johnson condemned the violence. But he defended the actions of congressional Republicans in objecting to Biden’s victory.

He wrote a two-page memo of talking points meant to buck up Republicans and lamented that the violence had almost eclipsed his careful arguments. “Most of the country has also never heard the principled reason,” he wrote.

Over a year later, on “Truth Be Told,” the Christian podcast he hosts with his wife, Kelly, Johnson continued to argue he and his colleagues had been right to object to the election results.

“The slates of electors were produced by a clearly unconstitutional process, period,” he said.

Johnson came to Congress in 2017 with support from the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, though he has never joined the group.

In an interview this year, he referred to Jordan, a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, as a “very close friend” who “has been a mentor to me since I got here”.

Johnson said Jordan called him when he was running for office because “he knew I was a conservative,” contributed money to his campaign, and invited him to Washington for a meeting with him and other Freedom Caucus members.

“He started providing advice to me,” Johnson said. “So now we’ve become very close.”

In 2020, the two men and their wives travelled to Israel together and met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Johnson has also made a close ally of Trump, and he served on Trump’s impeachment defence team.

On November 8, 2020, Johnson was onstage at a northwest Louisiana church speaking about Christianity in America when Trump called. Johnson had been in touch with the president’s team on his myriad legal challenges seeking to overturn the results, “to restore the integrity of our election process,” according to a Facebook post by Johnson recounting the exchange.

“We have to keep fighting for that, Mike,” he said Trump told him.

“Indeed we do, sir!” Johnson said he replied.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.