NASHVILLE -- A sworn deposition released recently by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol provides new, behind-the-scene details about the thinking of U.S. Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee on that day.
Hagerty had signed on with a group of senators planning to contest legal certification of Democrat Joe Biden's victory over Republican Donald Trump in the 2020 election and was prepared to follow through.
But Hagerty first wanted to be sure he was still in "sync" with his state's senior senator, Marsha Blackburn, according to the March 3, 2022, sworn testimony of former Trump White House deputy adviser and deputy press secretary Judd Deere before the Jan. 6 committee.
In the end, both Hagerty and Blackburn opted not to join the effort to contest the election's outcome, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
Joining them was then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., who had lost her Senate election and also had planned to object to certifying Biden's victory.
Loeffler made an emotional floor speech stating publicly that the violence at the Capitol that day led to her decision, but Hagerty and Blackburn did not explain their turnaround publicly.
Deere was in a unique position to know Hagerty's thinking, having previously agreed to take a job with him as the new senator's deputy chief of staff for communications once Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2022.
Much of Deere's sworn testimony -- the transcript runs 168 pages -- dealt with his interactions on Jan. 6 at the White House.
The committee's staffers, who weren't identified in the transcript, also appeared interested in Deere's interactions with Hagerty that day and what was discussed once the official proceedings were interrupted by an angry mob of Trump supporters in the first breach of the Capitol since 1814.
Those attacking the Capitol hoped to stop certification of the election results, many fueled by Trump's insistence that the election results were flawed despite his arguments being rejected by election officials, state governments, the courts, his own administration, the Electoral College and eventually Congress.
Eight senators and 147 members of the House cast votes objecting to the results, echoing the concerns of Trump and the rioters. Hagerty and Blackburn were not among them.
In sync
In response to questions, Deere told the committee he and Hagerty had discussed Blackburn's position by phone at various times during the day and into the evening of Jan. 6, with several discussions following the Capitol breach.
"I had received information from my soon-to-be employer, Sen. Hagerty, letting me know what he was hearing from his colleagues, where he was secluded in a secure location," Deere said in response to one question.
According to Deere, Hagerty told him talk among the senators had shifted from discussing whether to reject and audit Arizona's election results to discussion of impeachment and the 25th Amendment -- which allows the cabinet to remove an incapacitated president from office.
Deere said in response to a question that Hagerty "did express that several members had expressed very strongly that this had gotten out of hand and that, one, some expressed that they didn't know what to do or where this would ultimately go; and, two, there was another group that were hard-pressed to come back into session and to finish the work -- whatever time of day that ended up happening or how long it would take. He was basically expressing that tempers were very high."
Asked whether discussion of impeachment had come up in his call with Hagerty, Deere said "that there -- had picked up a lot of chatter among his colleagues, even among Republican colleagues, not just Democrats, that the conversation had, again, had turned from establishing a commission and debating the certification of votes to the 25th Amendment and impeachment articles."
Deere said Hagerty did not identify who was discussing the 25th Amendment.
"The senators thought that any effort to mount a sustained objection to any state had ended" due to the violence, Deere said he was told by Hagerty. "He indicated to me or reminded me that he and Sen. Blackburn had both agreed to the objection of certain battleground states to attempt to establish a commission and that whatever they ultimately decided to do later tonight, if they were able to come back into session, that he and Sen. Blackburn would need to be in sync," Deere said, according to the transcript.
"When you mentioned that Sen. Hagerty described needing to be in sync with Sen. Blackburn, was that in sync with each other, meaning the two of them needed to take the same position, or they needed to be in sync with the caucus, the party, a broader strategy?" the unidentified staffer asked.
"In sync, as in the two U.S. senators from Tennessee needed to make sure that they were aligned," Deere replied.
Deere declined to elaborate on his testimony with the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Spokespersons for Hagerty and Blackburn did not respond to requests for comment on Deere's testimony.
No action was taken on any 25th Amendment action to relieve Trump of duty. He was impeached by the House on Jan. 13, 2021, for incitement of insurrection.
Although 57 senators voted to convict him on the charge, that was not enough to meet the two-thirds vote requirement. Hagerty and Blackburn did not vote to convict.
Nation of laws
Hagerty and Blackburn have said little publicly about their abrupt dropping of prior plans to object to the certification of electoral votes. Both senators did publicly denounce the mob violence on social media later on Jan. 6.
"I have always believed in peaceful protesting," Hagerty said on Twitter at 2:43 p.m. that day. "What is happening at the U.S. Capitol right now is not peaceful, this is violence. I condemn it in the strongest terms. We are a nation of laws and this must stop."
Blackburn posted her response 13 minutes later.
"These actions at the US Capitol by protesters are truly despicable and unacceptable," she wrote. "While I am safe and sheltering in place, these protests are prohibiting us from doing our constitutional duty. I condemn them in the strongest possible terms. We are a nation of laws."
One of the Jan. 6 committee staffers told Deere that he gathered from his previous comments "the plan going in that day before the speech and the violence was that Sens. Hagerty and Blackburn were part of that group that indicated their intent to object to particular states, right?"
Deere responded, "I don't want to speak too much for Sen. Blackburn, but at least for Sen. Hagerty, he had indicated publicly that he would be -- that he intended to vote to object to the certifications of Arizona and Pennsylvania in an effort to try and establish a commission to audit those two states."
"He was one of the group of 10 or 11 that Sen. Cruz led that was essentially arguing for that outcome?" the staffer asked.
Deere said that was correct.
"OK," the staffer said. "So Sen. Hagerty, it sounds like over the course of the day, changed his position and no longer believed that he should be part of that group or should vote to object to Arizona or Pennsylvania?"
"In a subsequent phone call later that evening," Deere replied, "yes, the final decision was made by him that he would no longer -- that he would join Sen. Blackburn and no longer vote to sustain the objection or to object to Pennsylvania later in the night."
The staffer asked Deere whether he agreed with that outcome, personally.
"It is consistent with my personal view," he said. "However, it is not consistent with my professional advice to him."
"Tell us more about that," the staffer said. "What do you mean? What was your professional advice to him?"
"My professional advice was, you have stated publicly, sir, that you're going to object to Arizona and to Pennsylvania," Deere replied. "The amount of criticism that you will receive from conservatives, supporters of the president, many in the Republican Party at large will be loud and vocal if you don't do what you said you were going to do."
Asked what Hagerty said in response, Deere said he acknowledged it. Deere was then asked whether Hagerty had nonetheless indicated that he couldn't vote to object to the election results because of the violence.
"Yes," Deere replied. "The senator was -- yes, the violence had an impact on the senator, and he -- yes, that was a factor, but also Sen. Blackburn's decision no longer to sustain her own objection was also --"
"Was influential?" the staffer interjected. "The desire to stay aligned with her was another part of the calculus?"
"And the -- yes, was the leading factor," Deere answered.
The staffer asked whether there was some deference to Blackburn because she was the state's senior senator while Hagerty had just been sworn in.
"I'm just trying to get a sense of who was leading whom here," the staffer said.
"Um," Deere responded, "Sen. Hagerty is his own person, but -- he was fully prepared to do what he had indicated publicly he was going to do even after the violence occurred. But he and Sen. Blackburn had a long conversation, and he elected to follow her lead."
"And change his position?" the staffer asked.
"Yes," Deere replied.
The toll
According to Encyclopedia Brittanica, 140 police officers were criminally assaulted by the rioters in the Jan. 6 attack. Among the officers, one died of a series of strokes and two committed suicide. One rioter was shot and killed by police, another died of a heart attack and a third was apparently crushed by the mob. Dozens of people were injured, and some 900 people have been charged, including several Tennesseans.
Deere left Hagerty's office in July, a day before the select portions of his testimony on non-Tennessee matters were released by the Jan. 6 panel. He said at the time his departure had nothing to do with his testimony. The remaining deposition transcripts were released in December.
Despite Deere's predictions of political fallout if Hagerty opted against objecting to the election results, the senator's decision not to challenge Biden's victory appears not to have soured his relations with Trump.
Deere described to the committee two trips with the senator during which they visited the ex-president, the first being an April 2021 trip to the president's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
"Sen. Hagerty was doing a one-on-one meeting with him, and they both asked that I join the meeting," Deere recalled under questioning.
"He (Trump) acknowledged that it was a terrible day, but he believes that many of his supporters are being mistreated and that he doesn't believe that the rioters and people who instigated violence in the summer of 2020 had been held to the same scrutiny and standards as his supporters, who may or may not have stormed the Capitol had been," Deere said.
There was a second meeting in August 2021 with the former president at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Deere said, but no discussion about Jan. 6.
Last June, Trump appeared and spoke before a national conservative group at Opryland in Nashville, where he sharply criticized his former vice president, Mike Pence, who was a target of the rioters' ire on Jan. 6. Hagerty and Blackburn also spoke.
A day later, Hagerty tweeted a photo of himself and Trump. Both men were sitting in a golf cart, grinning and giving thumbs-up signs.
After leaving Hagerty's office, Deere returned to his native Arkansas, where he was brought on by then-GOP gubernatorial candidate Sarah Huckabee, herself a former Trump press secretary, to work in a communications role in her 2022 campaign, which she won. Deere is now the governor's communications director.
In good conscience
Since tweeting on Jan. 6, Blackburn appears not to have stated anything publicly about her dropping out of the effort to challenge the November 2020 election results.
More than four months after the violence, Hagerty appeared on the conservative Tennessee Star Report program where host Michael Patrick Leahy grilled him after first noting Hagerty had last been on the show Jan. 5, 2021, the day before the riot and certification of Biden's victory.
"And right here on this program, you told me how you were going to vote the following day," Leahy told the senator, according to a program transcript. "It was Jan.6 during the joint session of Congress when it convened to accept or reject the Electoral College vote. And here's exactly what you said. I'm quoting. 'I could not Michael, in good conscience, vote to accept the results of this election when I have such deep doubts about what happened here.' That's exactly what you said.
"But," Leahy said, "then less than 40 hours later, you voted to accept and certify all the Electoral College votes, even those from Georgia and Arizona. Here's my question. Can you please tell me and our audience why you voted exactly the opposite of how you told us you would vote?"
"What I did on Jan. 6 was, I objected to the Arizona results," Hagerty replied. "I did that because my aim was to create a commission, Mike, that would put the constitutional violations that we all know occurred back to the state legislatures, which is where this belongs to get it fixed."
It's not clear why Hagerty claimed to object to the Arizona election results, since he did not cast such a vote.
The only senators who voted to object to election results were Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ted Cruz of Texas, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, Roger Marshall of Kansas, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming and Rick Scott of Florida.
"I was never going to vote to nationalize the elections," Hagerty told Leahy. "What I want to do is uphold the Constitution and basically put this back to the state legislatures who are the ones that are constitutionally embodied to set the rules for state election laws for our federal election laws in their state.
"After the riot broke out, we lost all momentum to get this done. It wasn't going to happen. And what I did is I turned my attention to the legislation that I put forward. President Trump loves the legislation called the Protect the Electoral College Act."
The senator said the legislation, a version of which in the House was co-sponsored by Republican U.S. Rep. David Kustoff of Memphis, would require "an audit of what took place in the 2020 elections."
He said any state with a "constitutional violation" would be ineligible for any federal funds for elections "until they fix those problems."
Library of Congress records show no indication the measure passed in either chamber during the 117th Congress, a period during which Democrats controlled both the Senate and House.
"But in the end, you voted to accept Arizona's Electoral College votes and Georgia votes," Leahy told the senator of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.
"I voted to shut the arguments down," Hagerty said. "There are only two states raised, and that was not enough to make a difference. We needed to bring that to an end and find another venue to fix this problem."
"That was a disappointing vote to me," Leahy said. "But thank you for answering the question."
Hagerty did not mention being in sync with Blackburn as a key determinant of his vote.
Contact Andy Sher at asher@timesfreepress.com.