After gripping testimony from former Justice Department officials describing Donald Trump’s efforts to undo the 2020 election results, House lawmakers on Thursday identified five Republican lawmakers who allegedly sought pardons — suggesting not just their own fear of criminal exposure, but a belief that the outgoing president would preemptively protect them from the investigations that followed the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on Congress.

Videotaped testimony presented at the end of Thursday’s hearing named Reps. Matt Gaetz (Fla.), Mo Brooks (Ala.), Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Louie Gohmert (Tex.) and Scott Perry (Pa.) as the lawmakers who sought preemptive pardons after or, in at least one case, before the Capitol breach. They were among the most active and outspoken supporters in Congress of Trump’s false claims of election fraud.

The allegations of pardon-hunting came from Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and from John McEntee, a close aide to Trump. Such testimony strikes at one of the most fraught issues to emerge out of the Jan. 6 attack — the suspicion rife in many quarters of Congress that some of its members may have participated in criminal conspiracies to thwart the valid results of a presidential election.

“The only reason I know to ask for a pardon, because you think you’ve committed a crime,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), who led Thursday’s hearing of the House select committee investigating the attack.

Hutchinson testified...

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