Mo Brooks wore body armor until the January 6 March.

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Rep. Mo Brooks might finish on January 6, but January 6 isn’t over with him.

The Alabama representative, best known for his role as a speaker at the January 6 rally leading up to the invasion of the Capitol, did not see the first Tuesday hearing of the House Select Committee investigating the aforementioned invasion.

“I was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and I had at least one Zoom meeting, and all sorts of other things,” he told me on Wednesday when I met him outside the House chamber. “Busy day.” Not that the obvious timeline would have made a difference.

“The purpose of this commission is not to discern the truth,” he said. “The goal is to create political propaganda that can be used in the 2022 and possibly 2024 elections.”

But whether he is able to continue to avoid the commission altogether may not be up to him.

Back in December, Brooks was the first House Republican to say before receiving congressional Electoral College certification that he would object to voters of certain states. On Testimony Day, January 6, he then gave a fiery speech at President Donald Trump’s rally in Ellipse where he told the crowd that “Today is the day American patriots begin to take names and kicks!” Months later, he still argues that Trump would have won the election if only “legitimate votes” had been counted.

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Brooks’ support of Trump’s efforts to overturn the election secured the former president’s endorsement in the Alabama Senate race for 2022. But it also earned him legal troubles. California Representative Eric Swalwell sued Brooks and others earlier this year for the January 6 riots. The Justice Department this week rejected Brooks’ request to protect him from lawsuit, in part because he basically admitted he was thinking about winning the election — not doing his job — when his cheer began to gather. And although Brooks claims to dismiss the commission’s scheduled hearings as a political ploy, the commission may seek to bring him in for questioning about what he knew or did not know prior to the riots.

When I asked him if he could be summoned, he said, “I have no idea.”

Brooks, like Republican leaders who tried to reverse the hearing at yesterday’s press conference, believes that a proper investigation would look into why the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “did not do a better job with respect to the Capitol Police and their level of preparedness.”

Then, to prove his point about the preparation, Lee revealed new details: Because of advice he had received about potential violence, he was wearing body armor in the same Ellipse speech in which he encouraged attendees to gather to “begin removing names and kicking ass.”

“I was warned on Monday that there may be risks associated with the next few days,” he said. As a result of those warnings, I did not go to my condo. Instead, I slept on the floor of my office. And when I gave my speech at the Ellipse, I was wearing body armor.

That’s why I was wearing that cute little windbreaker,” he said to me with a smile. “To cover body armor.”

He didn’t say who he warned, or what “risks” he was warned about. There may have been “half a dozen different motives that influenced people to varying degrees” to get involved in the rebellion. He mentioned, for example, “the financial losses incurred by the government due to the government’s response to COVID-19,” “a belief that there is significant voter fraud and election theft activity” or “a great deal of love and respect for President Trump.”

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“It may be the case,” he added, “that some of them were just hardcore anarchists and saw this as an opportunity to infiltrate an otherwise peaceful protest and turn it into a riot.”

In Brooks’ affidavit asking the Department of Justice to protect him from liability, his attorneys emphasized parts of his speech where he encouraged peaceful protest, not physical violence. “Once again, Brooks makes no call for a physical attack on the Capitol,” one typical bottom note states. On the contrary, Brooks invites the Ellipse Speech attendees to do one thing: ‘Speak the words’! The affidavit says, “Remove the names and kick the ass!” The note was really about taking the names of Republicans who wouldn’t support the Electoral College’s objections to Trump, and punishing them in the next election.

But if he was so certain that the mob would understand the peaceful intent of his words, why would he need Kevlar?

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