A week ago Ted Cruz weighed in on the events of January 6th during his podcast called Verdict with Ted Cruz, explaining his thinking when he gathered 11 Senators together for an objection on January 6th and what he thought about the rhetoric on both sides in the aftermath of the election, including Trump’s.
We’ll start with his comments on the latter, which comes at 15:57 (it’s cued up):
Here’s what Cruz said:
Going in to this election [and] coming out of this election, we have seen overheated rhetoric, like crazy, on both sides of the political aisle. The Democrats and the news media – and sadly the news media is just part of the Democratic Party, they are one – their talking point is there is no voter fraud and it doesn’t exist, and for you to say voter fraud… It’s amazing. You read any newspaper article and anytime there is a reference to voter fraud, I think the editors mandate they put in ‘which is totally baseless and false’. And look, voter fraud has been a persistent challenge in elections and the media narrative that it doesn’t exist and you can’t say it exists is weird rewriting history.
Now listen, on the other hand, President Trump’s rhetoric, I think went way too far over the line. I think it was both reckless and irresponsible. Because he said over and over again that he won by a landslide, there was massive fraud, it was all stolen everywhere. That evidence – the campaign did not prove that in any court. And to make a determination about the election, it has to be based on the evidence. So simply saying the result you want, that’s not responsible and you never heard me use language like that. What I’ve said is voter fraud is real and we need to examine the evidence and look at the actual facts. And in particular, what is the evidence of how much voter fraud occurred and did it occur in sufficient quantities and sufficient states to alter the outcome of the election.
Just to be clear here, Cruz isn’t blaming Trump for the riot. He hasn’t even discussed the coup yet. He’s simply saying that Trump’s rhetoric went way too far.
For his comments on the riot and what happened in the Capitol as it began to unfold, start here at 19:15:
As I said, Cruz also explained his thought process on getting eleven Senators together before January 6th. In short, he didn’t like the two options before him of voting to overturn the election or pretending like voter fraud wasn’t a huge issue. So he began looking for door number 3 and that’s when he came up with creating a bipartisan commission to study election fraud. Watch the podcast from the beginning to hear what he’s got to say on this: