Retired Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) was one of a small handful of Republican senators who voted to convict former President Donald Trump over his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Despite this, he plans to vote for Trump again anyway, reported Spectrum News on Tuesday.
“My vote on the president wasn’t on anything the House presented… it was on the fact that I thought that the president leaving the vice president, without surging to Capitol Hill a protective detail, to take a vice president with a nuclear football, and to make him secure was a breach of office,” said Burr. “I think some were shocked. I think some might have voted a different way if I had told them. Very possibly. Very possibly.”
As for why he was going to vote for Trump this year despite all of this, he said: “Maybe someone will have a hard time squaring with it. I don’t have a hard time squaring with it because I firmly understood why I voted for impeachment. And l like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve. It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.”
He added that his vote to convict Trump was not a vote to disqualify him from office.
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At the time Burr cast the vote, it caused uproar in the North Carolina Republican Party, which censured him.
He retired from office in 2022, and Trump ally former Rep. Ted Budd, was elected in a surprisingly close race with former Democratic state Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley.
Burr is not the first Republican involved in the effort to impeach Trump who has gone on to give an endorsement to the former president in 2024. Former Rep. Peter Meijer (R-MI), who voted for the House's articles of impeachment, has also said he would back Trump for another term.
