Republican Senator Ron Johnson is sending the message that if you commit a crime for
just a couple of seconds or maybe a couple of minutes, maybe it's not really a crime.
It really depends on the length of time you're involved in a crime like,
let's say trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election or
attempting to dismantle our democratic process.
Now, he was speaking to a local ABC affiliate in Wisconsin.
And during that conversation, he found himself answering
questions about his involvement in attempting to install a slate
of sham electors that would essentially hand the election over
to Trump even though Joe Biden won that election.
Now, we've got the transcript of it, it's also on video, but it's local news.
So if you wanna watch the video version, it's all over the internet.
Here's what the transcript says though.
Matt Smith, the local news reporter says, have you been asked to testify?
Would you testify?
At that point Ron Johnson says no, I had nothing to do with January 6th.
Smith replies, if they asked you to testify though, would you?
Johnson says, what would they ask me to testify about?
And Matt Smith says, the Republican electors, and the slate.
Now, Ron Johnson of course is pretending like he doesn't know what they would wanna
ask him.
But as we heard from the January six hearings.
His staffers were exchanging text messages in regard to the slate
of sham electors that they wanted to hand over to Vice President Mike Pence.
And he's just pretending like he doesn't know about that.
Now, Senator Ron Johnson was then, continuing to say that again,
another grotesque distortion.
I had nothing to do with the ultimate slate.
I had no idea that anyone was going to ask me to deliver those.
My involvement in that attempt to deliver spanned the course of a couple of seconds.
So right there, he's already admitting that he was involved.
But it was just a couple of seconds.
I think I fielded three texts and sent two and
talked to my chief of staff that somebody wants to deliver something.
In other words, you were involved in discussions about
delivering a sham slate of electors.
Now he also says, I knew nothing about it.
In the end, those electors were not delivered because we found out
from the Vice President's staff that they didn't want it delivered.
Again, I had virtually no involvement.
Literally my involvement lasted seconds.
Okay, so let's pause for a second.
You were involved.
You are admitting on television in the context of this local news interview that
you were involved.
And the only reason why you and your staff didn't hand over the slate of
sham electors is because Mike Pence knew what you were trying to do and
he said, no, he wasn't interested.
It's kind of amazing, like he's just admitting it, but
somehow thinks that there's no incriminating element to this.
>> That's one of my favorite chords now, my involvement only lasted seconds,
which I think Republican men can say for a lot of things.
But okay, first of all, your honor, I pulled the trigger and the bullet
went out of it and murdered someone, but I only pulled it for a couple of seconds.
I mean that was my whole involvement.
I mean somebody handed me the gun and I shot it, but
it only took a couple of seconds and that guy was dead.
I mean that's, am I really culpable for that?
Yeah, totally.
So I've told the longer version of the story to members tyt.com/join, but
friends of mine had gotten punched by some guy.
They couldn't court is a long time ago.
And the knucklehead on the other side says your honor, man, that's not true.
I didn't punch him in the head.
I punched him in the stomach.
The judge is like yeah, that's still assault.
Thank you for admitting it.
You're guilty.
That's exactly what just happened to Ron Johnson.
And yes, he's as dumb as that metal head was done in Central Jersey.
All right, and last thing for me for now is,
the important part here though is, why is he back pedaling?
Because normally what Republicans do is goddamn right.
Yeah, those are the real electors.
I mean, we call them fake electors in the emails, but whatever, okay,
Donald Trump is president/king/prophet, but he's not saying that.
And he's trying to get away from Trump, what that means is, he's in trouble.
Poll numbers in Wisconsin showing he's losing there to Democrat Mandela Barnes.
And so now all of a sudden he's like Trump who, fake electors what, stolen election,
never heard of such a thing, involved for only a couple of seconds.
Is that right?
>> Right, he's trying to distance himself from Trump and
I think it's really fascinating when you see that happen.
I mean, we saw that happen with Oz as he's running for
that Senate seat in Pennsylvania.
During the primary, he really positioned himself as a Trump lackey and
now during the general, he's distancing himself.
But this incident with Ron Johnson is a little different.
Both I think because of this ongoing January 6th investigation and because
it's not really something that bodes well for him in his re-election campaign.
Now, Matt Smith, the reporter continues to ask Johnson,
if the Vice President's chief of staff wouldn't have said, don't deliver these,
would you have brought the documents to the Vice President?
It's a great question.
By the way, shout out to Matt Smith.
I think he did an excellent job with the interview when he asked tougher questions
than we see certainly from cable news reporters, but
Ron Johnson responds and says, in what way could have I?
Again, we did our due diligence.
If somebody hands us something, we're supposed to deliver to the Vice President.
Does he want it?
Nope, okay, end of story, that was it.
But it's important to understand that Ron Johnson is pretending like he didn't know
what those documents were, he did know what those documents were.
He did know that the documents contained the sham electors.
And so when he, honestly, he sounds like someone who's traveling with a massive
amount of drugs and then they get caught and they're like, I didn't know that that
drug trafficker gave me a giant package of cocaine to smuggle into the United States.
I had no idea.
And with Ron Johnson, you knew, we have evidence that you knew, in fact, why don't
we go to the last graphic here and it's the exchange between his staffers.
So Sean Riley says, Johnson needs to hand something to the Vice President
of the United States please advise, Chris Hodgson or
whatever his name is says, what is it?
Sean Riley responds, alternate slate of electors.
And it's obviously clear that that's what they're referring to and
then Chris responds.
Do not give that to him.
And I think at that point it became clear that the vice president wasn't willing
to do Trump's bidding by essentially using this sham slate of electors.
And then one other thing that doesn't look good for Ron Johnson is how quickly he
runs away from questions pertaining to his involvement.
If you can remember there was an earlier incident when a reporter was trying to ask
him about it in Capitol Hill and he pretended like he
was talking to someone on the phone when in reality he was not.
Let's watch that.
>> Did you know about what your chief of staff was doing with the alternate slates
of electors?
No you're not, I can see your phone, I can see your screen.
>> I can see your screen.
And then later he had no choice but to actually answer the questions and
his answers change a little bit Cenk.
They don't stay the same.
So let's watch one more video.
Pay close attention to what he says here versus what he said in the interview with
the local news reporter in Wisconsin.
>> Why was your chief of staff even offering this to the Vice President?
>> That's a complete non-story.
We've issued a statement, and this is a complete non-story.
I don't know what you're concerned about here.
>> [CROSSTALK].
>> This was a staff to staff exchange and I was basically unaware of it.
And the chief staff contacted the Vice President's staff and said,
do you want this?
They said no and we didn't deliver it and that's the end of story.
>> But why was he even asking for that?
>> Because somebody delivered this to our office and
asked to deliver that to the Vice President.
>> Did you support his efforts to try to get those slates to the Vice President?
>> No, I had no knowledge of this.
>> Really, so did you do the crime for just a couple of seconds or
were you not involved at all?
Seems like the story is changing a little bit.
>> Yeah, there's hypocrisy all over this.
Because whenever they go to the, I got staffed, excuse,
that means it's really bad.
That's them going pulling a shaggy, they want me, want me.
It was my low level staffers, go fire them, I'll fire them.
I don't care, I'm a Republican anyway.
I'm terrible to my workers.
And I would give me nothing but pleasure to get rid of one of them for fun anyway.
So I'll blame them for what I did.
So that's normal but guys, one more thing.
If there's nothing wrong with what you did,
why do you have to excuse it by saying you only did it for a couple of seconds.
>> Right, that's a really great point.
It really is.
Yeah, and again, the story changes ever so
slightly depending on what day you catch him.
And I would have no problem testifying under oath if I knew that
my involvement was not a problem, that I wasn't involved at all.
But he seems to be running away from the idea of having to testify or
cooperate with this investigation.
And I think that alone is problematic, at least in terms of optics.
>> Yeah, hey, did you help your friend move in?
Only for a couple of seconds.
No, you would be proud.
You would say, yeah, I spent all day helping my friend move in.
It was really hard, but hey, no big deal, okay?
You wouldn't say I did it only for a couple of seconds.
You only say that when you're guilty.