'So many pieces falling together’: Jan. 6 panel nails GOP’s Scott Perry as ‘leading conduit’ for Trump's election theft ploy
A Republican congressman has landed in the crosshairs of the House select committee, but he's been on investigators' minds all along.
Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) has been asked to turn over documents and sit down with committee members to discuss his role in Donald Trump's attempt to install loyalist Jeffrey Clark as attorney general ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection, and Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" what investigators already know.
"My colleague Tom Hamburger and I confirmed that Scott Perry was, in fact, the lawmaker who did send that text to Mark Meadows that Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) read aloud last week to direct [Mark] Meadows to please check your Signal [encrypted app] and that immediately, I think, piqued the interest of the investigators," Alemany said.
"Look, this letter is a significant step forward for the committee and for the reporters that have been covering the committee since its inception in July or earlier this summer," she continued. "It's always been a question of how the panel is going to handle getting sitting lawmakers to cooperate with them, as we knew from the very beginning that people like [House minority leader] Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), [Rep.] Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Scott Perry were in touch with the president and his inner circle about the effort to overturn the result of the 2020 election."
"But Scott Perry, in particular, is of interest," Alemany said. "We found reporting that he's the leading conduit from the House GOP to the White House in terms of trying to effort the challenge to the 2020 election, and he's been on the mind of congressional investigators really for a whole year now. When the Senate Judiciary Committee released their report in October, they cited Perry as someone who was integrally involved with these efforts. They had already gotten evidence that [Rep. Bennie] Thompson echoed yesterday that he was directly pressuring [Department of Justice] officials to investigate these various fringe conspiracy theories. He also acknowledged in those interviews with the Senate Judiciary Committee that he was the person who introduced Mark Meadows to Jeffery Clark, who has also become a central player."
"So there are so many different pieces that are kind of falling together here," Alemany added. "But he big question remains whether Scott Perry is going to cooperate and how far this committee is going to go in getting a sitting member of Congress to actually comply with this investigation."
Leave a Comment
Related Post