# Mo Brooks **Mo Brooks** (Morris Jackson Brooks Jr.) represented Alabama's 5th congressional district — anchored on Huntsville — from **2011 to 2023**. A [[House Freedom Caucus]] member and one of the most aggressive congressional promoters of [[Stop the Steal]], he is best known for the speech he gave at the Ellipse rally on the morning of **January 6, 2021**, and for the extraordinary sequence by which [[Donald Trump]] first endorsed and then publicly discarded him. He is a useful figure in the vault precisely because he ended up outside the tent: several of the most damaging on-the-record claims about Trump's post-election demands come from Brooks, made after his endorsement was withdrawn, by a man who cannot plausibly be characterized as a Trump opponent. ## January 6 Brooks spoke at the rally preceding the attack on the Capitol, telling the crowd: **"Today is the day American patriots start taking down names and kicking ass."** He later maintained the line was aimed at "weakling, cowering, wimpy Republican congressmen and senators" facing re-election in 2022 rather than at the certification proceeding. The detail that undercut that account emerged in July 2021: Brooks **wore body armor** while delivering the speech and had slept on his office floor rather than at his condo. He said he had been warned two days earlier of the potential for violence. The warning is the problem — it establishes that he anticipated violence at the event where he told the crowd to start kicking ass. Brooks was named by [[Ali Alexander]], the national organizer of Stop the Steal, as one of three members of Congress — with [[Andy Biggs]] and [[Paul Gosar]] — who coordinated on planning the January 6 events. He was sued by Representative [[Eric Swalwell]] and sought to have the Justice Department substitute itself as defendant on the theory that his speech fell within the scope of his federal employment; DOJ declined. ## The Trump break Brooks ran for Alabama's open Senate seat in 2022. Trump endorsed him in April 2021, calling him "a great Conservative Republican leader." In **March 2022** Trump withdrew the endorsement, saying Brooks had "made a horrible mistake recently when he went 'woke'" — the offense being that Brooks had told an August 2021 rally to put the 2020 election "behind you" and look forward. Brooks's response is the material that matters. He stated publicly that **Trump had repeatedly asked him to rescind the 2020 election, remove Joe Biden from the White House, reinstall Trump, and hold a new special presidential election** — and that he had told Trump, as a lawyer, that neither the Constitution nor the U.S. Code permitted any of it. He then said he would testify before the January 6 committee. Trump endorsed Katie Britt instead. Britt defeated Brooks in the June 21, 2022 runoff by roughly **66% to 34%**. Brooks left Congress in January 2023 and has not returned to office. ## The 2026 officeholder-exclusion push Brooks re-enters the record in August 2026 as a critic — on tactical rather than moral grounds — of the Republican effort to bar naturalized and dual citizens from public office (see [[Qualifications Clauses]]). Speaking to Atlantic staff writer Toluse Olorunnipa, he argued that in a country growing more diverse, telling naturalized Americans they cannot run for office guarantees they will vote for the other party: **"It is one of the dumbest tactical moves I've ever seen politicians make."** The objection is worth recording for what it is not. Brooks does not say the proposal is unconstitutional or unjust; he says it loses elections. The constitutional half of the same report came from [[Pamela Karlan]], who told Olorunnipa that the officeholding qualifications "are exclusive" and delivered the verdict recorded at [[Pamela Karlan - ugly stupid and unconstitutional]]. That makes it a distinct category of evidence — an intra-coalition warning delivered in the coalition's own vocabulary — and it is the kind of receipt that is harder to dismiss than an outside critique. ## See also - [[Stop the Steal]] · [[Big Lie]] · [[2020 Presidential Election]] - [[Andy Biggs]] · [[Paul Gosar]] · [[Ali Alexander]] — the coordination network Alexander described - [[Eric Swalwell]] — plaintiff in the civil suit over the January 6 speech - [[Donald Trump]] — endorsed, then withdrew; the source of Brooks's most consequential disclosures - [[Qualifications Clauses]] · [[Nancy Mace]] — the 2026 exclusion push he criticized - [[Pamela Karlan]] — the constitutional objection alongside his tactical one, in the same report - [[House Freedom Caucus]]