Hawley Claims He ‘Never Said’ the ‘Goal Was to Overturn the Election’

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is adamant he did not attempt to overturn the election when he voted to challenge the electoral results.

“I never said that the goal was to overturn the election. That was never the point and it was never possible,” Hawley said during an interview with St. Louis radio station KMOX.

He added, “I think we need to have a debate about election integrity. I think this is the right forum to do it in. This was never about overturning an election, but it is about Congress exercising its oversight capacity. It is about shining a light on what some of these states did.”

Hawley stressed he never intended to overturn the election and denied he ever incited the violence that swept the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

“That’s just a lie. That is a lie told by the left-wing mob that now wants to silence me and Ted Cruz and 140 House members and 13 senators and anybody who would dare stand up to them. Anybody who is a Trump supporter who refuses to bow the knee. And I’m just not gonna be silenced,” Hawley said.

He continued, “It is a lie that I was trying to overturn an election or that Ted Cruz was trying to overturn an election. It is a lie that I incited violence.”

Listen to the interview below:

📺 Embedded media — coming soon

Hawley sent a letter to the Senate Ethics Committee on Monday calling for an investigation into the seven Senate Democrats who filed an ethics complaint against him and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over the Capitol riots, as IJR reported.

He urged the committee to “discipline these Members to ensure that the Senate’s ethics process is not weaponized for rank partisan purposes.”

The letter from the Senate Democrats reads, “The question the Senate must answer is not whether Sens. Hawley and Cruz had the right to the object to the electors, but whether the senators failed to ‘ut loyalty to the highest moral principles and to country above loyalty to persons, party, or Government department’ or engaged in ‘improper conduct reflecting on the Senate’ in connection with the violence on January 6.”