Jan. 6 committee releases transcript of Vos testimony
FILE - Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos talks to the media after Gov. Tony Evers' State of the State speech at the state Capitol on Feb. 15, 2022, in Madison, Wis. Vos was scheduled to be the final witness interviewed Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2022, by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as the panel wraps up its work, its chairman said.
MADISON, Wis. — The U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol released transcripts Friday of an interview it conducted with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to find what, if any, influence former President Donald Trump exerted on the speaker to overturn the election results.
According to Vos’ testimony, the speaker had no contact with Trump or an emissary leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, but traveled to a rally with the former president and spoke numerous times on the phone while the Wisconsin Assembly was investigating the election in late 2021.
That included when Vos joined Trump traveling to a rally in Alabama, which included a widely-reported photo of the two of them sitting together on a plane.
Vos said he was invited by former White House chief of staff and Republican Party of Wisconsin chair Reince Priebus to provide an update on the 2020 election investigations in Wisconsin.
“I told him about some of the issues that we had discovered. There were accusations of fraudulent ballots that were cast in a nursing home,” Vos said. “We had just begun an investigation in Wisconsin, and I updated him on some of the things that were occurring.”
Vos testified that Priebus wanted the meeting to allow the speaker to talk directly to Trump and avoid Vos’ efforts to investigate the election to possibly be negatively “mischaracterized.” Some Wisconsin Republicans, and eventually Trump himself, criticized Vos for not doing enough to overturn the results of the election.
“I think he wanted to make sure that I had the chance to tell that and not have others do it on my behalf, perhaps in error,” Vos said. “I wanted to do a thorough investigation … there were some in Wisconsin that wanted to go backwards and attempt to do something different in 2020.”
“I informed President Trump that under the Constitution there was nothing we could do [to overturn the results],” he added.
Wisconsin’s Assembly speaker testified that he had no knowledge of any efforts by the Trump campaign to try and pressure Wisconsin’s Legislature to overrule the state’s electoral college vote, nor that he was part of any discussions with the group of Republicans that met as a false slate of electors to the electoral college.
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