Congressman Scott Perry at a bridge dedication for SFC Randall Shughart in Newville on May 30, 2024.
Jeremy Long - WITF
Trump ally Rep. Scott Perry weighs in on attempted assassination
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Ben Wasserstein/WITF
Jeremy Long - WITF
Congressman Scott Perry at a bridge dedication for SFC Randall Shughart in Newville on May 30, 2024.
Pennsylvania’s U.S. Representative from the 10th District is voicing his take on the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump in Butler County Saturday.
“It’s a range of emotions that are hard to quantify,” Republican Scott Perry said.
The former Freedom Caucus chair said much violent rhetoric has become accepted because Trump was president, noting examples such as Kathy Griffin’s photo with a fake, decapitated model of Trump’s head.
Perry said in an interview Monday that he denounces all violence.
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is helped off the stage at a campaign event in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, July 13, 2024.
“We live in a country where we resolve our differences at the ballot box and rhetorically,” he said. “So yeah, we don’t accept violence.”
Perry, however, supported then-President Trump’s efforts to stay in power despite his loss at the polls.
He pressured the president to name Jeffrey Clark, then-acting Assistant Attorney General, to be Attorney General.
Clark was sympathetic to Trump’s view that the election had been stolen, according to the New York Times, and had agreed to write a letter to Georgia officials saying the Justice Department had found irregularities in the voting there, when no such problems had actually been discovered.
Clark was also indicted in the Georgia election racketeering prosecution, which is related to efforts to overturn the election.
Perry’s phone was seized by the FBI in August 2022 as part of a federal investigation into Trump’s mission to stay in office through overturning the results.
Texts received by the Jan. 6 Select Committee show Perry messaged former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows prior to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Mark, just checking in as time continues to count down,” he wrote. “11 days to 1/6 and 25 days to inauguration. We gotta get going!”
On Jan. 6, 2021, Perry stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and objected to the counting of any votes cast for president in Pennsylvania despite no evidence to call those results into question.
On Monday, Perry said he had merely? requested investigations into the conduct of the 2020 election.
He was re-elected that year with 53.3% of the vote .
In the interview Monday, Perry also said he tries to temper his own rhetoric.
“I always try and choose my words carefully to make the point but not to make it offensive to anyone,” he said. “I fall short of the grace of God. So I make mistakes, but I’ve always tried it.”
Perry declined to discuss the specific mistakes he was referring to.
A collection of interviews, photos, and music videos, featuring local musicians who have stopped by the WITF performance studio to share a little discussion and sound. Produced by WITF’s Joe Ulrich.
