Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania, announced Tuesday that he’s refusing to comply with the House panel investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Perry, the first sitting member of Congress the panel has summoned, claimed in a series of tweets that the panel is “illegitimate, and not duly constituted under the rules of the US House of Representatives” before saying he was declining his colleagues’ request to speak with him.
Perry’s refusal comes a day after he bipartisan panel announced it had found evidence showing Perry, who has denied the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s victory, had “an important role” in installing former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark as the acting attorney general during the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency. Clark played a key role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, bolstering Trump’s baseless claims that the election was rife with voter fraud.
In a letter to the Pennsylvania lawmaker, panel chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said the committeee also had evidence that, in the leadup to the riot, Perry used the encrypted Signal app to communicate with Trump’s former chief of staff about Clark.
Clark told the committee he plans to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if the committee requests to speak with him.
“When Mr. Clark decided to invoke his 5th Amendment rights, he understood that we planned to pose questions addressing his interactions with you, among a host of other topics,” Thompson wrote to Perry.
Perry’s refusal to comply comes shortly after the House voted in favor of recommending criminal charges against former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows over his failure to fully cooperate with the Jan. 6 panel.