Upton on Trump officials speaking out about Jan. 6: ‘Where were they a year and a half ago?’
Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach former President Trump after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, said Thursday that other GOP members now speaking out about Trump’s actions that day “should’ve helped us” at the time.
“What disappoints me the most is here we are a year and a half later, we’re now just getting other Republicans within the former administration to step up, to tell what they thought, what they saw happened,” Upton told NBC’s Peter Alexander on “Meet the Press” Thursday afternoon.
“Where were they a year and a half ago, when 10 of us voted our conscience and decided to cast the vote that we did?”
A handful of Justice Department officials — including former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue and then-head of the Office of Legal Counsel Steven Engel — appeared for a public hearing last month to detail Trump’s pressure campaign to cast doubt on the 2020 election.
Trump’s former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, who was replaced by Mark Meadows in 2020 but stayed on as a diplomatic envoy in the administration, has penned recent op-eds warning that “things could get very dark” for Trump amid recent revelations of his actions before, during and after Jan. 6.
The House Jan. 6 panel also secured the testimony of Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, who is scheduled to appear for a transcribed interview on Friday.
The nine other GOP members who joined Upton in voting for Trump’s impeachment were Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), Tom Rice (S.C.), Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), Tony Gonzales (Texas), John Katko (N.Y.), Peter Meijer (Mich.), David Valadao (Calif.), Jaime Herrera Beutler (Wash.) and Dan Newhouse (Wash.).
“None of the 10 of us regretted our vote that we cast,” Upton said Thursday.
Upton is among half of the group that has decided against running for reelection, while others are facing Trump-backed primary challenges. Rice lost his mid-June primary, insisting just before the election that Trump “is not the future of the Republican party.”
At the end of June, 14 Republicans broke with their party to vote with their Democratic colleagues on a gun control bill. Seven were from the group of 10 that voted for impeachment: Cheney, Upton, Rice, Kinzinger, Gonzales, Katko and Meijer.
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