Ted Cruz hid in a closet next to a stack of chairs as a crowd of Donald Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6 in an effort to keep him in the White House, but the Texas Republican senator has revealed that Cruz never hesitated to keep casting doubt on the former president’s electoral defeat.
In a new book, Cruz described where he was on the day of the deadly Capitol attack, which was intended to prevent Joe Biden from officially defeating Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Newsweek was the first to break the story.
Cruz was listening to Oklahoma senator James Lankford speak in the Senate when a huge disturbance broke out outside, according to the book Justice Corrupted. The meeting was suspended as Capitol police arrived to accompany Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, off the dais after the mob demanded that he be hanged.
Cruz asserted that he “vehemently disagreed” with a number of his coalition allies who desired to abandon their opposition to the certification.
Cruz later joined only six other Republican senators in voting against the certification of Trump’s defeat in the electoral college of Arizona. He was one of seven Republican senators who rejected announcing Trump’s electoral college victory in Pennsylvania.
Cruz’s positions have made him unpopular in some areas. He traveled to the Bronx on Sunday to witness a baseball playoff game between the Houston Astros and the New York Yankees.
One smartphone video showed New York supporters yelling at Cruz, flipping him off, and cussing him out before the Astros won and eliminated the Yankees. One fan even called Cruz a “failure” before the Astros defeated the Yankees.
After he and his fellow senators were taken to a safe place, Cruz claimed that some people became irate and blamed him and his allies in the chamber “explicitly for the violence that was unfolding.” Cruz, after all, had contributed to the propagation of the false claims made by the deposed Republican president that the election had been rigged against him, igniting the mob that was now occupying the Capitol.
Nine deaths, including suicides by frightened law enforcement agents, have been officially attributed to the Capitol attack since then. In connection with the incident, more than 900 rioters have been accused, some of whom are accused of seditious plot.
A bipartisan US House committee has made public evidence that Trump played a direct role in the Capitol attack during a series of live-streamed hearings this year. Recently, that committee subpoenaed the former president and demanded that he appear before the panel and provide records.
Cruz’s term won’t expire until 2025, so his position won’t be in jeopardy on November 8, when Biden’s fellow Democrats will be fighting to maintain slim numerical advantages in both houses of Congress.
