About
Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) was first sworn in to the U.S. House of Representatives on Jan. 3, 2021, representing Georgia’s 9th Congressional District. He ran for a second term in 2022 with Trump’s endorsement and won his district with more than 70% of the vote. In an online video posted to Twitter in September 2022, he vowed to undermine the FBI once Republicans “take the House back” after the midterms.
A former Navy officer who served in several deployments in Kuwait and Iraq, Clyde is also a gun dealer and founder of Clyde Armory, a weapons retailer with two locations in Georgia.
The congressman is also a vocal opponent of a woman’s right to choose. In 2013, he purchased and donated a 5,000-square-foot facility to Athens Crisis Pregnancy Center, an organization that attempts to dissuade women from having abortions. He received an “A+” rating from the Susan B. Anthony List National Pro-Life Scorecard for voting “against the pro-abortion agenda of the Biden-Harris administration and Pelosi Democrats who are actively working to expand abortion access and abortion funding.”
Both before and after the 2020 presidential election, Clyde helped spread the Big Lie by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the process and making claims of fraud unfounded by facts. He objected to certifying President Biden’s Electoral College win and voted against both impeaching Trump for inciting the mob and establishing a special House committee to investigate the insurrection, among other measures.
In August 2022, the day after the FBI retrieved thousands of government documents from Mar-a-Lago, Clyde again showed his fealty to Trump and zeal to spread fear and mistrust, tweeting: “If they will weaponize the FBI to go after President Trump, they will surely weaponize the IRS’s 87,000 new agents to go after you.”
January 6, 2021
- Just hours after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol, Clyde joined 146 other congressional Republicans in refusing to certify Biden’s win of the 2020 presidential election.
- After the attack, Clyde likened the rioters to a “normal tourist visit” and claimed that calling it an insurrection was a “bold-faced lie.” Nonetheless, photos of the House chamber as the mob was getting closer show him screaming and barricading the door to prevent rioters from entering.
- Clyde voted against impeaching Trump for his role in inciting the insurrection, claiming that, “quite simply, it is a shameful final act of political retribution—retribution this president has weathered since day one.”
- Clyde voted against establishing a House committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack.
The Big Lie
- On Dec. 15, 2020, Clyde signed a letter with 25 other GOP House members-elect calling on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to investigate he “reported gross violations of our elections process” following the 2020 presidential election.
- In 2021, Clyde attacked the proposed voter protection bill, H.R. 1 (also known as the For the People Act), derisively calling it the “For the Politicians Act” and falsely stating that it would require states to issue absentee ballots without any form of identification or verification. He added that he was “proud to [vote] no to the federal takeover of our elections.”
- On Jan. 6, 2022, The Washington Times published an op-ed in which Clyde complained of voting “irregularities” and “strong evidence of illegal ballot harvesting” in Georgia during the 2020 election.
- Clyde was among 34 Republican members of Congress who texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows about various schemes to overturn the election results—both before and after the events of Jan. 6, according to TPM. Among the messages Clyde sent Meadows was one dated Jan. 9, 2021—after Twitter shut down Trump’s account—saying, “I would like to pass to POTUS that we are still with him…. I truly hope he does create a new platform to complete [sic] with Twitter and I hope he calls it Trumpet and then we can send out notes to each other!”
Election Audits
- In October 2021, Clyde spoke at a House Oversight Committee hearing on Arizona’s election audit. He said that the federal government should not “actively work to prohibit Arizona, or any state, from carrying out a forensic audit to verify the integrity of its election laws.” Clyde added that audits are essential to “restore public trust at the polling booth.”