Johnson, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has invited two Trump campaign attorneys who sought to reverse election results in Nevada and Wisconsin and a representative from Republican Pennsylvania, as well as former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who was on The Defense against impeachment of President Donald Trump.
“We have a trial in this country, under the constitution and our judicial system, that must be followed,” Senator Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who is not attending the hearing, told CNN last week. “The idea of changing or interrupting that process is a serious mistake in my opinion.”
While Trump and his allies have claimed he will continue to fight the election results, Monday’s electoral college urged McConnell to congratulate Biden on the Senate floor on Tuesday, though some Republican senators have yet to acknowledge that Biden has won.
When asked Monday if Biden was president-elect, Johnson said it was “definitely walking that path, wasn’t it?” But Johnson defended his decision to hold his election fraud hearing, saying that “a large percentage of the US population simply doesn’t see this as a legitimate outcome for a variety of reasons.”
“Yes. I didn’t see anything that would convince me that the results – the overall national result – would be destroyed,” Johnson said.
Democrats are accusing Wednesday’s hearing of a forum for spreading the unproven conspiracies outright dismissed in courts in all battlefield states where Trump disputed the result. One of the witnesses, James Troupis, represented the Trump campaign during the failed Wisconsin lawsuits. Another witness, Jesse Binnall, Trump’s lawyer in Nevada, groundlessly claimed on November 17 that Trump had won the state. The Nevada challenge of the campaign was also rejected.
“I am shocked by the choice of many of my colleagues to help spread the president’s lies and false stories about the outcome of the 2020 election,” said Senator Gary Peters, the panel’s senior Democrat.
Johnson’s committee is no stranger to controversy this year. His committee published the findings of its investigation into the business dealings of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, during the fall campaign, which Romney also criticized as a political move.
And last month, he invited a vaccine skeptic who has promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 patients – despite the Food and Drug Administration’s statement that it should not be used to treat coronavirus patients – to testify at a hearing of the committee.
Congress will formally count the electoral college vote on Jan. 6, a process in which a group of House Republicans plans to object to the results in the states that Biden won. It’s a challenge that can only delay the inevitable, but if a Republican senator joins the objections, the two chambers should debate and vote on whether or not to uphold the challenge.
Johnson said last week that the hearing would help him decide whether to object, and another GOP senator who hasn’t ruled out joining the House Republicans, Rand Paul of Kentucky, is also a member of the Homeland Security Committee.
On Tuesday, however, Johnson told the Journal-Sentinel that he has no plans at this point to object to the election on the ground. “Something should surface that would call into question the legitimacy of the election,” he said.
CNN’s Manu Raju and Ali Zaslav contributed to this report.