Scott Perry had a hardscrabble childhood, enlisted in the Army National Guard at age 18, worked at various blue-collar jobs, and put himself through college.
In the service, he graduated from Officer Candidate School, qualified as a helicopter pilot, flew combat missions in Iraq, and rose to the rank of colonel. He’s a member of the American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. A bedrock American who bootstrapped himself up.
But along the way, there were warning signs about his character. With his mother, he started a company that specializes in “large meter calibration,” working mostly for utilities; he was accused of falsifying sewage records, a criminal offense, but “was allowed to complete a diversion program and avoid criminal charges, which allowed him to maintain his U.S security clearance” (details here).
Perry, who was elected to Congress in 2012 after serving in the Pennsylvania state legislature, tried to overthrow our government after the 2020 election. the Philadelphia Inquirer called him “one of the leading figures in the effort to throw out Pennsylvania’s votes in the 2020 presidential election” (same link as above).
He “promoted false claims of election fraud,” was involved in efforts to block Georgia’s electoral votes, and after the FBI seized his phone investigators found hundreds of phone calls to other conspirators involved in illegitimate efforts to keep Trump in the White House (see story here). But the true significance of his role is he may have been the GOP congressman at the center of “the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results from inside the House of Representatives” (see story here).
That scheme, basically, consisted of getting the Senate to reject enough electoral votes to deprive Biden of a 270-vote majority, which would have thrown the election into the House of Representatives, where each state gets 1 vote and Republicans held a 26-24 voting advantage.
Perry must have known what he was doing was not only in bad faith, but also might expose him to criminal prosecution, because he secretly asked Trump for a presidential pardon. He didn’t get it. None of the conspirators did. Like the others, Perry badly misjudged Trump, who has repeatedly thrown loyal supporters under the bus.
So far Perry hasn’t been charged with a crime related to Trump’s and the Republican Party’s seditious efforts to overthrow America’s democracy. But he’s in the sights of the federal special prosecutor, and only time will tell whether his luck will continue. So far, he’s losing court battles to keep those hundreds of illicit phone conversations away from the special prosecutor, so we’ll see. And from what I’ve read in various other sources, he’s one of the members of Congress most likely to be indicted for actions related to the 2020 election.
Whether he is or not, enough is known about Perry’s activities to conclude he violated the oath to defend the Constitution he took when he entered the military and again when he was sworn into Congress. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised; after all, this is a guy who falsified sewage records. Maybe if he’d gone to jail for that instead of being let off easy, he wouldn’t have gotten into a position to commit worse betrayals of the public trust.
Betray our country and its democracy he did.