Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers — a longtime Republican who voted for Trump and has said he would again — told the House committee investigating Jan. 6 that “I do not want to be a winner by cheating.”

“I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to,” the Mormon and father of seven said as his voice broke and his eyes filled with tears. “How else will I ever approach [God] in the wilderness of life, knowing that I ask for this guidance only to show myself a coward in defending the course he led me to take?”

Bowers was the first of several witnesses at Tuesday’s hearing to detail efforts by Trump and his inner circle to undo the former president’s 2020 election loss by pressuring state officials to subvert the will of the voters and put forward false slates of electors.

The committee has previously described Trump’s “seven-part plan” to remain in power as a “seditious conspiracy.”

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