John Boehner Admits He Voted for Trump After Further Condemning Him for Capitol Riot

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Last updated on April 14th, 2021 at 09:11 pm

Former House Speaker John Boehner (R) admitted he voted for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 general election even while Trump continued to spread falsehoods about the voting process.

“I voted for Donald Trump. I thought that his policies, by and large, mirrored the policies that I believed in. I thought the choices for the Supreme Court were top notch. At the end of the day, who gets nominated to the federal courts is really the most important thing a President does,” Boehner told TIME ahead of the publication of his book On the House: A Washington Memoir.

But Boehner says he does not wish he’d been more involved in pushing back against Trump’s claims that the election was fraudulent even before January 6, the day a mob of his supporters stormed the United States Capitol in a bid to overturn the election results.

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“No. I’m retired. I try to stay out of the day-to-day rumble of politics,” Boehner said. “I really didn’t need to speak up. At some point [in 2018], somebody asked me about the state of the Republican Party, and I said, ‘The Republican Party’s taking a nap.’ I wrote to my staff several days after January 6, I said, ‘I called it a nap but now it’s become’… I might have said ‘crisis.’”

Boehner’s remarks came after he told USA Today that Trump “abused” his loyalists, including after January 6.

“I don’t think it was just about him showing up at a rally on Jan. 6th,” he said. “The comments that were made all summer about the election was going to be stolen from him, all the follow-up noise that occurred after the election – I kept looking for the facts.”

“What struck me, especially after the election, was here’s all these people loyal to Donald Trump, and he abused them. He stepped all over their loyalty to him by continuing to say things that just weren’t true,” he added.

Boehner also criticizes Trump in his book, writing that he “incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bulls*** he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November.”