Former President Donald Trump has been endorsed by one of the seven Republicans who voted to convict him during his second Senate impeachment trial.
Former Senator Richard Burr, who retired from the upper chamber in January 2023, voted to convict Trump on charges of incitement of insurrection following the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which occurred shortly after a Washington, D.C., rally that saw Trump tell supporters to head to the Capitol to “fight like hell” as a joint session of Congress certified President Joe Biden‘s 2020 election win.
Trump was impeached for the first time in late 2019, accused of withholding military aid to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Biden. Burr did not vote to convict Trump after the first impeachment. Neither impeachment resulted in conviction in the Senate, where a two-thirds supermajority vote is required to convict.
On Monday, Spectrum News reported that Burr said during an interview in July that he intends to vote for Trump this year despite his vote in 2021, which he argued was not intended as “a disqualifier as to whether you can serve” but instead a protest of Trump’s decision to abandon former Vice President Mike Pence at the Capitol while rioters chanted out their desire to “hang” him.
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“My vote on the president wasn’t on anything the House presented,” Burr told the outlet. “It was on the fact that I thought that the president leaving the vice president, without surging to Capitol Hill a protective detail, to take a vice president with a nuclear football, and to make him secure was a breach of office.”
Burr went on to say that while “maybe someone will have a hard time squaring” his support for Trump with finding him guilty of incitement to insurrection, he does not “have a hard time squaring with it” because he “firmly understood why [he] voted for impeachment.”
“And l like I said, that’s not a disqualifier as to whether you can serve,” Burr added. “It’s a bad choice I thought a president made one time.”
Newsweek reached out for comment to the offices of Trump and Pence via email on Tuesday evening.
Pence, who challenged Trump for the GOP nomination last year, has repeatedly said that he will not be backing his former running mate in this year’s election, pointing out “profound differences” between himself and Trump “on a range of issues” during a Fox News interview earlier this year.
Trump turned on Pence following his refusal to attempt to block the certification of Biden’s 2020 win, while also accusing the former vice president of being “not a very good person” and “going to the Dark Side” after Pence denounced him for putting “himself over the Constitution.”
Former Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, who became another frequent target of Trump’s rage after certifying Biden’s Arizona victory, announced in a social media post that he would be putting “differences aside” by endorsing both Trump and pro-Trump U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake on Tuesday.
A small but significant number of former Republican lawmakers have recently committed to endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, over Trump in this year’s election.