Republican Rep. Chip Roy privately warned that Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results were ‘driving a stake in the heart of the federal…

Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas speaks on the floor of the House of Representatives on April 23, 2020.House Television via AP

Roy texted Mark Meadows concerns about Trump's rhetoric and the effort to overturn the 2020 election.

He said Trump was "whipping his base into a conspiracy frenzy" and should "tone down the rhetoric."

He added that "we're driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic" by trying to reject electors.

Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas privately warned Mark Meadows that President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the election were inciting his base and undermining the country's electoral system in a series of texts in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election.

The texts between Roy and Meadows, Trump's final White House chief of staff and a former member of Congress, were reported by CNN on Friday along with a series of texts from Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah.

"We must urge the President to tone down the rhetoric, and approach the legal challenge firmly, intelligently and effectively without resorting to throwing wild desperate haymakers or whipping his base into a conspiracy frenzy," Roy texted Meadows on November 9, two days after major networks called the 2020 election for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.

Two days earlier, Roy texted Meadows that "we need ammo. We need fraud examples. We need it this weekend."

The texts show that the Texas Republican, a hardline conservative member of the House Freedom Caucus that Meadows helped found, was initially supportive of the former president's legal challenges to the election.

CNN reported that Roy was also supportive of John Eastman, a conservative legal scholar who later laid out a blueprint for Vice President Mike Pence to reject states' electors. On November 22, he texted Meadows to "get Eastman to file" in front of the state board of elections in Pennsylvania, one of the states where Trump hoped to reverse the election results.

But as early as December 10, prior to the meeting of the Electoral College , Roy publicly warned in a Twitter thread that the lawsuit filed by the Texas attorney general "represents a dangerous violation of federalism."

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"The president should call everyone off. It's the only path," Roy later texted Meadows on December 31. "If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by congress every 4 years... we have destroyed the electoral college... Respectfully."

"We're driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic," Roy texted Meadows the following day.

Roy later voted to certify the results of the 2020 election, breaking with 147 of his Republican colleagues. Following the riot on January 6, he said that "the President should never have spun up certain Americans to believe something that simply cannot be."

While Roy ultimately voted against impeaching the former president, he then declared on the House floor on Jan 13 that Trump "deserves universal condemnation for what was clearly, in my opinion, impeachable conduct."

Roy's communications director, Nate Madden, told CNN that the texts "speak for themselves," and Roy did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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Republican Rep. Chip Roy privately warned that Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results were 'driving a stake in the heart of the federal...