After Electoral College affirmed Biden win, Ron Johnson to hold hearing to probe 2020 election

One day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said plainly that Joe Biden was the President-elect, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson is holding a controversial hearing Wednesday to probe the 2020 election.

Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has invited two Trump campaign lawyers who tried to overturn the election results in Nevada and Wisconsin and a Republican Pennsylvania state representative, as well as former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who was part of President Donald Trump’s impeachment defense.

Christopher Krebs, the former top administration official for cybersecurity who was fired by Trump for saying there wasn’t widespread fraud in the election, is testifying as the Democratic witness.

Senators in both parties have raised concerns that the hearing is promoting debunked conspiracy theories about the election, and one Republican senator is not participating. It comes as Trump has continued to spread baseless and false claims about fraud in the election and ignored Monday’s Electoral College vote that affirmed Biden as the winner of the presidential election, 306 electoral votes to 232.

“We have a process in this country, under the Constitution and our judicial system, which should be followed,” Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican who is not participating in the hearing, told CNN last week. “The idea of trying to change that process or interrupt it is, in my opinion, a grave mistake.”

While Trump and his allies have claimed he will keep fighting the election result, Monday’s Electoral College vote prompted McConnell to congratulate Biden on the Senate floor on Tuesday, although some Republican senators have still yet to acknowledge that Biden won.

Asked Monday whether Biden was President-elect, Johnson said it was “certainly walking down that path, isn’t it?” But Johnson defended his decision to hold his election fraud hearing, saying there’s “a large percentage of the American population that just don’t view this as a legitimate result for a host of reasons.”

Johnson said Tuesday in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that he considered the election “legitimate.”

“Yes. I haven’t seen anything that would convince me that the results — the overall national result — would be overturned,” Johnson said.

Democrats charge Wednesday’s hearing provides a forum to spread the unproven conspiracies that were roundly rejected in courts in all of the battleground states where Trump challenged the result. One of the witnesses, James Troupis, represented the Trump campaign in its unsuccessful court challenges in Wisconsin. Another witness, Jesse Binnall, who was Trump’s attorney in Nevada, baselessly claimed on November 17 that Trump had won the state. The campaign’s Nevada challenge was also dismissed.

“I am appalled by many of my colleagues’ choice to help spread the President’s lies and false narratives about the outcome of the 2020 election,” said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the panel’s top Democrat.

Johnson’s committee has been no stranger to controversy this year. His committee released 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 stating that it should not be used to treat coronavirus patients — to testify at a committee hearing.

Congress will formally count the Electoral College vote on January 6, a process where a group of House Republicans are planning to object to the results in states Biden won. It’s a challenge that can only delay the inevitable, but if a Republican senator joins the objections, the two chambers are required to debate and vote on whether to uphold the challenge.

Johnson said last week that the hearing would help him decide whether to object, and another GOP senator who has not 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 he did not have any current plans to object to the election on the floor. “Something would have to surface that would call into question the legitimacy of the election,” he said.

McConnell on Tuesday urged Republican senators on a private conference call not to join House members to object to state electoral results, a source on the call told CNN. Other top Republicans, including Senate Majority Whip John Thune and Senate Rules Chairman Roy Blunt, echoed that sentiment. Doing so, they said, would be fruitless and force them to cast a politically challenging vote against the President that day.