By Beth Reinhard and Mariana Alfaro
Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) has been fanning false claims for years, long before his efforts to overturn the 2020 election based on former president Donald Trump’s baseless allegations drew the attention of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
In the fall of 2017, Perry claimed a former House aide to Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) orchestrated “massive” data transfers that amounted to a “substantial security threat,” according to Fox News. The Pakistani American staffer, Imran Awan, was later cleared of stealing government secrets by federal prosecutors.
Around the same time, Perry suggested then-CNN host Chris Cuomo was exaggerating the lack of water and electricity in hurricane-devastated Puerto Rico. “You’re simply just making this stuff up,” Perry said. Hurricane Maria was later tied to nearly 3,000 deaths.
In January 2018, Perry speculated about an Islamic State connection to the mass shooting in Las Vegas the previous year, contradicting law enforcement’s assertion that the accused gunman was working alone. “I smell a rat like a lot of Americans,” he said.
Perry’s incendiary remarks in recent years made bold headlines that quickly faded. Now, the five-term congressman and incoming chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus has drawn the scrutiny of the bipartisan House panel probing the deadly insurrection by a pro-Trump mob.
🏛️
Follow Politics
Follow
On Tuesday, Perry rebuffed the committee’s request for communications and voluntary testimony, the first significant action the panel has taken to obtain information from a sitting member of Congress.
“I stand with immense respect for our Constitution, the Rule of Law, and the Americans I represent who know that this entity is illegitimate, and not duly constituted under the rules of the U.S. House of Representatives,” Perry said in a statement. “I decline this entity’s request and will continue to fight the failures of the radical Left.”
The committee, which was established by a vote of the full House, is interested in Perry’s efforts to help install Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official sympathetic to Trump’s stolen-election claims, as acting attorney general. Perry introduced Clark to Trump, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee report released in October that named Clark as a key figure in the attempt to overturn the election.
The Senate report found that Perry, along with Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R), pressured top law enforcement officials to investigate the state’s 2020 election results. According to the report, Perry and Mastriano contacted Richard Donoghue, who was the Justice Department’s second-ranking official, to urge him to investigate Trump’s spurious claims of widespread voter fraud.
Donoghue told Senate investigators that during one conversation with Perry, the congressman complained “generally about the FBI” and the Awan investigation.
Perry and his office declined repeated requests Tuesday for comment from The Washington Post about that probe, as well as his record in Congress, public policy views and past public statements.
Jan. 6 insurrection: The Washington Post investigation
In 2017, during the investigation into Awan, Perry reached out to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, whose office was handling the probe as well as a separate investigation into the murder of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich. Perry raised concerns in an Aug. 11 letter to Channing D. Phillips that a federal prosecutor in his office, the brother of former DNC chairwoman Wasserman Schultz, faced potential conflicts of interest regarding the two investigations.
At the time, right-wing conspiracy theorists were casting Awan as a Pakistani government agent and Rich as the leaker of DNC documents during the 2016 campaign. Those allegations were debunked. The congresswoman’s brother had nothing to do with either investigation, which were handled by separate sections of the U.S. attorney’ office, according to a Dec. 18 response from the Justice Department’s legislative affairs office. Perry’s letter and the response became available through public records requests.
“It was kind of ludicrous. All these conspiracy theories were running around, and there was no merit to any of them,” Phillips, a Democrat and former career prosecutor who is now retired, said in an interview with The Post on Tuesday. “He had his facts wrong, that’s all I can say.”
Perry, a combat veteran who began his political career as a state representative in Pennsylvania, worked from an early age picking fruit at a farm in Mechanicsburg, Pa. The grandson of Colombian immigrants and the son of a single mom who fled abusive partners, Perry was raised in a home he describes as “spartan” in his campaign biography. His family relied on public assistance for several years. He found jobs as a mechanic, dock worker and insurance agent before graduating from Pennsylvania State University. By 1993, he was running his own mechanical contracting firm.
Trump endorsed Perry in his 2018 and 2020 reelection bids, tweeting in May 2020 that Perry is “an incredible fighter for Pennsylvania.” Perry has long relied on his working-class background to rally support among his rural Pennsylvania base.
“He’s overcome a lot in life to get to Congress, and he’s not giving up, though all he does is push this extreme rhetoric,” said Democrat Eugene DePasquale, the former Pennsylvania auditor general who unsuccessfully challenged Perry in 2020 and is considering a rematch.
In Pa., close House race is a microcosm of Trump-Biden showdown
Perry’s record reflects his allegiance to the far right. Last year, he was among 18 House Republicans to vote against a resolution condemning QAnon, a conspiracy theory that Trump is fighting a war against a satanic, child sex trafficking ring run by the “deep state.” The FBI has labeled the online movement a potential domestic terrorist threat.
In March, Perry voted in opposition to the Violence Against Women Act, despite fellow Pennsylvania Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick being the bill’s chief Republican sponsor. Two months later, he opposed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes act, which called for protecting Asian Americans amid a rise in hate crimes during the pandemic.
Perry criticized the Biden administration’s decision to pull troops out of Afghanistan and voted against a bipartisan bill to expedite visas for Afghan refugees. He later told journalist Greta Van Susteren that allowing more Afghan refugees into the country would lead to “little girls raped and killed in the streets.”
Earlier this month, Perry baselessly accused Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), one of three Muslim members of Congress and the co-sponsor of a bill to combat Islamophobia abroad, of sympathizing with terrorists.
Throughout the pandemic, Perry has questioned the efficacy of masks and vaccines. He has declined to respond to questions about whether he has been vaccinated against the coronavirus. He tested positive for it last month and said his symptoms were “quite mild.”
“This government is saying you’ll inject something into your body whether you want to or not,” Perry said at a news conference at the Capitol in July. “That’s the definition of tyranny.”
During the Jan. 6 attack, as lawmakers hunkered down in a room keeping them safe from the rioters descending on the Capitol, Perry was among a group of Republicans who refused to wear masks, according to video posted by Punchbowl News.
In January, Perry’s profile will rise even higher when he becomes the leader of the House Freedom Caucus, a group formed in 2015 by conservative Republicans frustrated with GOP leaders for compromising with Democrats. Members of the caucus include Reps. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) — both of whom have endorsed Trump’s groundless theories of election fraud.
If Republicans take control of the House in next year’s midterm elections, the Freedom Caucus could have a key role in picking the next House speaker.
“We have fought together for conservative values in the face of fierce Socialist Democrat and RINO Republican opposition,” Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), a co-founder of the Freedom Caucus, said last month, using a pejorative term that means “Republican in Name Only.”
“At this pivotal moment in history, strong fighters are vital to protecting our foundational principles and freedoms. Scott Perry fits that bill,” he said.
Perry currently serves on the House Foreign Affairs and Transportation and Infrastructure committees.
During his first three campaigns for Congress, Perry handily won his solidly Republican district in central Pennsylvania. In 2018, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reconfigured the state’s congressional districts, setting new boundaries for Perry’s seat with more Democratic areas. Perry defeated DePasquale by just 6.6 percentage points in 2020.
Perry also faces a potential reelection challenge from Brian Allen, a former Republican who said he left the party because it embraced Trump’s baseless accusations of a rigged election.
“There’s been a drip, drip, drip of information on Perry and how intimately he was involved in trying to overthrow the election,” DePasquale said in an interview Tuesday. “For the Jan. 6 committee to take this step and seek an interview with a sitting member of Congress means they feel it is serious.”
According to the Senate Judiciary report authored by the Democratic majority, Perry was one of the first Republicans to cast doubt on the 2020 election, saying four days after the vote that “legal votes will determine who is POTUS, not the news media.” Perry led the objection to counting Pennsylvania’s electoral votes on the House floor in the hours immediately following the Jan. 6 insurrection. Republicans on Senate panel offered counterfindings, arguing that Trump did not subvert the justice system to remain in power.
“The review of what happened in 2020 is legitimate, and Scott Perry is obviously a leader,” said former Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman Rob Gleason. “I stand by the fact that there are still a lot of concerns about the election.”
According to a Monday letter by Jan. 6 committee chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), Perry communicated with Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows about Clark, the official who sought to use Justice Department resources to support Trump’s false claims of massive voting fraud. People familiar with documents Meadows turned in to the committee say it was Perry who flagged the chief of staff about his encrypted messages. Perry has denied sending the “Please check your Signal” text to Meadows.
“Representative Perry has information directly relevant to our investigation,” a committee spokesman said Tuesday, adding that the committee would consider “other tools” to get evidence from members who decline to cooperate voluntarily. One week ago, the committee voted to hold Meadows in contempt for defying a subpoena.
Perry acknowledged that he had introduced Trump to Clark in a January statement in which he said he had worked with the Justice Department official in the Civil Division on “various legislative matters.” Perry also said: “When President Trump asked if I would make an introduction to Clark, I obliged.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccurately reported that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) was a member of the House Freedom Caucus. According to his office, he is not a member, and the story has been corrected.
Culled from the Washington Post
