When it comes to the Jan. 6 attack, and his interactions with Donald Trump the day of the insurrectionist riot, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has generally adopted a confident posture. “If they call me, I got nothing to hide,” the Ohio Republican boasted early last week.
This week, that confidence seemed a little shaky.
Despite previously hedging on whether he’d spoken with the then-president on the day of the pro-Trump violence, Jordan appeared on Fox News on Tuesday and appeared to grudgingly concede that he and Trump spoke on Jan. 6. Given the bipartisan congressional investigation into the Capitol attack, it was a new and notable detail.
But did the Republican congressman mean what he said? Taylor Popielarz of Spectrum News also interviewed Jordan this week, and tried to nail down the details. “Yes or no: Did you speak with President Trump on January 6?” the host asked. The video of the exchange is worth watching, though TPM’s Josh Marshal took the time to transcribe the Ohioan’s answer:
“Yeah, I mean I speak, I spoke with the president last week. I speak with the president all the time. I spoke with him on January 6th. I mean I talk with President Trump all the time. And that’s, that’s, I don’t think that’s unusual. I would expect members of Congress to talk with the President of the United States when they’re trying to get done the things they told the voters in their district to do. I’m actually kind of amazed sometimes that people keep asking this question. Of course, I talk to the president all the time. I talked, like I said, I talked with him last week.”
Asked whether he and spoke Trump before, during, or after the Capitol attack, Jordan added:
“Uh, I’d have to go, I’d, I, I, I spoke with him that day after, I think after. I don’t know if I spoke with him in the morning or not. I just don’t know. Uh, I’d have to go back and, I mean I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know, uh, that, when those conversations happened. But, um, what I know is that I spoke with him all the time.”
The congressman then tried to change the subject.
I won’t pretend to have any expertise in body language, but I think it’s probably fair to say Jordan seemed ill at ease discussing these details on the air.
As we talked about the other day, this is the same Jordan whose record surrounding Jan. 6 is clearly problematic. The New York Times reported last week, for example, that the far-right lawmaker participated in a meeting at the White House, where he plotted with Trump on how best to contest the results of the 2020 presidential election. The Republican also went on record saying, reality be damned, “I don’t know how you can ever convince me that President Trump didn’t actually win this thing.”
Jordan, of course, also voted against certifying the results of the presidential election, signed onto a legal brief asking the Supreme Court to reject the election results, and voted against creating the House select committee to investigate the insurrectionist riot. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) nevertheless tried to appoint Jordan to the investigatory panel — a choice House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) rejected for reasons that should be painfully obvious. (Michael Gerson described Jordan’s selection as “a malicious choice.”) Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a member of the bipartisan panel, noted this week that Jordan may very well be called to testify before the committee, largely because he was “involved in a number of meetings in the lead-up to what happened on Jan. 6, involved in planning for Jan. 6, certainly for the objections that day.” After Jordan’s on-air comments this week, I think the odds of him being subpoenaed are close to 100%.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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