August 02, 2023 11:02 AM UTC

Meet Rep. Lauren Boebert, Co-Conspirator 1776

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: An unrepentant Rep. Lauren Boebert defends the 2020 coup attempt in a new interview yesterday, reciting the same barely-coherent set of disproven talking points she used in the 2022 GOP primary (below)–and hopes the indictment leads to eventual Trumpian triumph:

Constitutional scholar Lauren Boebert explains how Trump was legally justified trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/nQDMQ4LvEz

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 2, 2023

Does this mean Boebert’s erstwhile friend Tina Peters was right too? Maybe what Peters claims about Boebert encouraging Peters to hack her own voting machines is true? Each foray into the subject by Boebert leaves more questions than answers.

And there will be many more forays. We’re just getting started.

—–

Following yesterday’s indictment of ex-President Donald Trump on federal criminal charges related to the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the attempt by Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential elections, the majority of Republicans including several of Trump’s nominal primary opponents in the 2024 presidential race have once again come out in defense of the former President with the same vigor they denounced the charges filed against Trump over hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels.

But the charges Trump faces for plotting to overturn the 2020 election are immeasurably more serious than any of his previous criminal indictments, addressing what among all of Trump’s many misdeeds arguably inflicted the most lasting damage to the country. After the initial shock caused by the violence on January 6th more or less unified the political establishment in outrage against Trump, Republicans quickly realized that their base remained loyal to Trump even after what had happened–necessitating the slow but inexorable backsliding of the majority of Republicans into backing Trump once again and (worse) seeking to rewrite the history of January 6th and the 2020 elections.

But there are some Republicans who never wavered in their support for Trump, even as the rioters were smashing their way into the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. At the top of that list is Colorado’s Rep. Lauren Boebert, who invoked the rioters in her floor speech that day just before the Capitol was evacuated.

The oath that I took this past Sunday to defend and support the Constitution makes it necessary for me to object to this travesty. Otherwise the laws passed by the legislative branch merely become suggestions to be accepted, rejected or manipulated by those who did not pass them.

Madam speaker, I have constituents outside this building right now. I promised my voters to be their voice.

As our readers know well, January 6th, 2021 started as a big day for newly sworn-in Rep. Lauren Boebert. It began with a Tweet to her hundreds of thousands of followers that “Today is 1776,” after which Boebert headed to the Ellipse next to the White House for the speeches by Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, and Donald Trump that incited the crowd to march on the Capitol. From there, Boebert made her way to Congress in time to give her floor speech taking ownership of the oncoming rioters. Once the rioters were inside, Boebert Tweeted that Speaker Nancy Pelosi had been removed from the House chambers, which has been hotly debated ever since as a possible instance of Boebert trying to assist the insurrectionists who were at that moment threatening to hang Speaker Pelosi.

Reviewing Rep. Boebert’s actions on January 6th is important as we digest her response to yesterday’s indictment of Donald Trump:

Unlike other Republicans who had at least a fleeting moment of clarity immediately following January 6th only to backslide under pressure from their MAGA base later, Boebert remained faithful to Trump, and continued to recite the “Big Lie” that Trump should still be President–including on the campaign trail last year. Here’s Boebert at a May 2022 debate against her Republican primary opponent Don Coram:

Thank you very much for that question. Election integrity is something that Americans have been absolutely focused on. And I am proud that the first major action that I took in the House of Representatives was to vote to not certify some of the Electoral College results from the 2020 election. We clearly saw that at least six states violated their state and federal constitution. The Constitution states that it is the state legislature that makes election laws, not unelected bureaucrats, not secretaries of state, not attorney generals.

And then Boebert got, well, fired up:

We saw hundreds of thousands of ballots go out illegally. Hundreds of thousands. We saw illegally–illegal drop boxes being placed. The state legislatures did not change election law. So this is something that the states absolutely need to take care of. Our state legislatures need to secure elections and make sure that nothing like this ever happens again. We’ll probably have more health problems in the future, but we should never allow something like a Fauci-funded Chinese virus to interfere with our elections.

Though perhaps not outrageously referring to COVID-19 as the “Fauci-funded Chinese virus,” these are essentially the same arguments made by Giuliani, Eastman, and local Trump attorney Jenna Ellis in their campaign to persuade Republican legislatures to embrace the “fake electors” scheme in the runup to the certification vote on January 6th. Every single one of these allegations has been debunked in court both before and since January 6th. These are allegations so demonstrably baseless that the attorneys who repeated them face professional sanction and possible criminal indictments of their own.

No one to date has accused Boebert of being much more than a cheerleader for the “Big Lie,” and a regurgitative source of the misinformation that underpins it. The threat to Boebert lies less with the judicial system, but rather with the voters in her district who came within 546 votes of sending Boebert to early retirement last November. Accountability for what happened on January 6th, 2021 is crucial for the judgment of history regarding Donald Trump, but also for voters in CD-3 who will decide Boebert’s fate in November of 2024.

At urgent issue in both decisions is whether the next January 6th can be prevented.