MaddowBlog-Speaker Johnson abandons all subtlety, embraces role as an election denier

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The House Republican has an ugly record when it comes to baseless election conspiracies. This week, he made it worse.

It’s easy to forget the degree to which Speaker Mike Johnson is a died-in-the-wool, knee-jerk election denier who touts genuinely bonkers ideas, indifferent to their ridiculousness.

We’re not just talking about a few election-administration concerns; we’re talking about brazen nonsense.

— Steve Benen (@stevebenen.com) 2026-02-04T17:49:27.347Z

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/speaker-johnson-abandons-all-subtlety-embraces-role-as-an-election-denier

Two days later, asked about Trump’s support for a federal takeover of election administration, the House speaker continued to endorse conspiratorial concerns about “some of the blue states,” before he raised some new and specific concerns.

Mike Johnson on Trump calling for Rs to "nationalize" elections: "We had 3 Republicans who were ahead on election day in last cycle & every time a new tranche of ballots came in they just magically whittled away until their leads were lost. It looks on its face to be fraudulent. Can I prove it? No"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-02-03T19:33:43.243Z

....The House GOP leader has a long record of endorsing bizarre beliefs that he can’t prove, including declaring at a 2024 press conference, “We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections.”

But this latest example is especially offensive. To hear Johnson tell it, preliminary vote totals gave some Republican candidates optimism, until a more complete picture showed them losing. This, in his mind, suggests the results were “fraudulent,” which is ridiculous......

In the wake of Trump’s 2020 defeat, for example, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a crackpot lawsuit intended to invalidate state election results that Republicans didn’t like. It was Johnson who took the lead, not only in endorsing that ill-fated lawsuit, but also in getting his GOP colleagues to sign on to an amicus brief in support of the Texas case.

The New York Times reported that the lawyer for the House Republican leadership told Johnson at the time “that his arguments were unconstitutional.” The future speaker proceeded anyway. The same Times article referred to Johnson as “the most important architect of the Electoral College objections” on Jan. 6, 2021, which were intended to keep Trump in office despite his defeat....

“President Trump called me this morning to express his great appreciation for our effort to file an amicus brief in the Texas case on behalf of concerned Members of Congress,” Johnson wrote in the December 2020 email. “He specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join on to our brief,” he continued. “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”

Or, put another way, Johnson was a member of Congress, but he effectively took on the role of a member of Trump’s political-legal operation, becoming the then-president’s point man on Capitol Hill while Trump was trying to seize illegitimate power.

This came on the heels of a radio interview in which the Louisiana congressman echoed a discredited conspiracy theory involving Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Dominion Voting Systems — nonsense that even many Trump acolytes no longer feel comfortable repeating.

In the same on-air appearance, Johnson also falsely told the public, “In Georgia, [the 2020 election] really was rigged. It was set up for the Biden team to win.”

It was after this that Johnson voted with other Republicans to reject the results of the 2020 election.....

This week, the House speaker is offering the political world a timely reminder about how brazen an election denier he still is.

[dalton99a]

1. Johnson was the legal architect of Jan. 6

[NewHendoLib]

2. Fucking asshole