Pence’s involvement in the meeting is important as he will chair the joint session of Congress that will count election votes that day. Brooks said Pence attended “different parts” of the meeting.
Brooks told CNN Monday night they would try to challenge elections in at least six battlefield states, saying he must coordinate “a whopping 72” five-minute speeches that GOP lawmakers would hold that day. “That is an important task,” he said.
The effort is doomed to fail, but would create a spectacle that Senate GOP leaders want to avoid. And if a Member of Parliament and a senator objected to the results of six states, that would lead to at least 12 hours of debate, in addition to voting time on each of the motions, potentially extending the fight until the next day .
The White House meeting, Brooks said, was to discuss “how bad the voter fraud and electoral theft” was in November, although such claims have been rejected by election officials and courts across the country.
Brooks said the meeting was attended by a “double digit” number of lawmakers, but he would not say whether senators were part of the meeting. Brooks said the group had a separate meeting with Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. And the Alabama congressman also said he had seen in the White House Sidney Powell, the attorney whose election conspiracies have piqued Trump’s interest. But, he said, they have not met her.
Other GOP lawmakers also confirmed their attendance at the meeting, including Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar, who told CNN, “We talked about a lot of things.”
Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, a staunch Trump defender, said this when asked if Trump urged him to object to the election results at the meeting: “He didn’t push, didn’t have to, I always intended to object.”
Rep. Jody Hice, a Georgian Republican who attended the rally, tweeted, “I will object to Georgian voters on January 6.”
Sources told CNN there were other members, including Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a prominent ally of the president, who has urged him to continue the fight.
While the House Conservatives have virtually no chance of success, it would put many Republicans in an awkward position. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell and his top lieutenants have urged senators not to join the House’s conservatives because then they would be forced to cast a vote that would allow them to choose between Trump and the likes of the voters.
But several senators have not ruled out joining the effort, including Sens. Josh Hawley from Missouri and Rand Paul from Kentucky. And Trump has praised incoming Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville for indicating that he would object to the results.
“January 6 seems a long way off,” Marshall told CNN when asked if he wanted to participate.
At the joint session, any member of Congress may object to the results of a state. All it takes is one House member and one senator to challenge a state’s voters, and the House and Senate must stop the joint session to deliberate and vote on the issue separately for two hours. whether or not to exclude the results of the disputed state.
“In a general sense, how it looks like we’re on the way, it looks like we’ll have valid objections to the number of states on January 6,” Brooks said. “And we will probably know what the results of the electoral college are sometime on January 7, after all the speeches and votes have taken place.”
Brooks added that no one in the House GOP leadership has discouraged him from taking these steps, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who has not yet formally recognized Biden as president-elect, even though McConnell has. At a GOP conference call last week, McCarthy was asked about the Jan. 6 meeting, but bypassed the demand to focus on the Covid-19 relief talks, the participants said.
Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise, the House minority whip, has also failed to acknowledge Biden’s victory. And when asked by CNN whether members of the House should challenge the election results on January 6, Scalise did not discourage them from doing so. Instead, he pointed to the way objections were raised during George W. Bush’s victories and during the 2016 Trump presidency.
But in those past races, the defeated presidential candidates had already given in – while Trump has actively sought to reverse an election he lost.
“If one of the Republicans has done it, it’s clearly not the first time it has been done,” Scalise said Monday. “Every Republican president in the past three terms has been objected to by the Democrats.”
CNN’s Ali Main contributed to this report.