Mike Lee’s Role in Trump’s Attempted Coup
What would have happened if
his plan worked?
APRIL
18, 2022 5:38 AM
Senator Mike Lee’s
defenders insist his repeated texts to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark
Meadows offering his guidance on the proper constitutional process to overturn
the 2020 election results prove his honor. Never mind that the basis for
overturning the election wasn’t anything more than Donald Trump’s desire to do
so. Details, schmetails!
Let’s bat the argument
around, though. The texts show Lee was eager to assist Trump in
challenging the election—to the point of Lee texting Meadows dozens of times,
begging “please tell me what I should be saying” and offering his advice about
what should be done. (Pour one out for his Article One Project.)
Specifically, these texts and Lee’s other on-the-record statements show he was
consistent in advocating that the only way, according to the Constitution, to
change the outcome was for state legislatures to appoint alternate slates of
electors for Congress to accept on Jan. 6. Lee spent much time and effort
insisting on this. But, the state legislatures did not. So Lee did not raise
any objections on January 6th and voted to certify Joe Biden as president. And,
for this Lee is supposed to be some kind of hero.
Slow clap.
Because what if
GOP-controlled state legislatures in the swing states Biden won had decided
to appoint Trump electors based on whatever Cheetos-dust some drive-by gang of
Cyber Ninjas sniffed and got high on while seizing Dominion Voting machines?
Well, as Lee wrote Meadows on January 3: “Everything changes, of course, if the
swing states submit competing slates of electors pursuant to state law.”
Got that? Everything
changes. If state-level Republicans had been okay with overturning the
election results, then Lee was okay with it, too.
In interviews with Bob Woodward and Robert Costa
for their book Peril, which came out in September 2021, Lee
depicted himself as someone who, through December 2020, “never wavered” from
the view that Congress had no role in messing with Electoral College votes.
The story goes that
someone “directed” him to speak with John Eastman around Christmastime. Soon,
Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz started looking at other options to challenge
the election results, and Lee didn’t go along with their plans.Then, on January
2, in Woodward and Costa’s account, Lee was “shocked” to receive a memo from
Eastman. The memo—the short, two-page version, not the six-page
version Eastman later developed—outlined a scenario where “7 states have
transmitted dual slates of electors to the President of the Senate.”
It’s conceivable Lee was
shocked that Eastman wanted the president of the Senate, Mike Pence, to play
such a prominent role on Jan. 6th. But the idea of alternate electors is one
that Lee knew plenty about—because he and his friends had been talking about it
quite a bit.
Some relevant texts to keep in mind:
· Lee writing to Meadows on November 9, 2020:
“We had steering executive meeting at CPI tonight, with Sidney Powell as our
guest speaker. My purpose in having the meeting was to socialize with
Republican senators the fact that POTUS needs to pursue his legal remedies. You
have in us a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him, but
I fear this could prove short-lived unless you hire the right legal team and
set them loose immediately.”
· On November 23, Lee told Meadows that Eastman
has “really interesting research,” indicating that he was familiar with Eastman
and respected his analysis. (By this point, Eastman was apparently just
starting to work with Trump’s political-legal team. He had not yet written his
infamous memos or represented Trump in a rejected Supreme Court motion, but had sent out plenty of tweets insinuating that Democrats had by
various means stolen the 2020 election from Trump.)
· On December 8, Lee texted Meadows: “If a very
small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative
slates of delegates, there could be a path.”
Lee was on board with Kraken lady, coup memo man, and an alternate
elector plot. Check, check, check.
The “CPI” Lee mentioned
is presumably the Conservative Partnership Institute. Its leaders, and a
who’s-who list of other prominent Lee allies in the conservative
movement, issued an open letter on December 10 that
said:
The evidence
overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states—as the result of a
coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups—violated the
Constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that
resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories.
There is no doubt
President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election.
Joe Biden is not president-elect.
Accordingly, state
legislatures in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia,
Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan should exercise their plenary power under the
Constitution and appoint clean slates of electors to the Electoral College to
support President Trump. Similarly, both the House and Senate should accept
only these clean Electoral College slates and object to and reject any
competing slates in favor of Vice President Biden from these states.
Conservative leaders and groups should begin
mobilizing immediately to contact their state legislators, as well as their
representatives in the House and Senate, to demand that clean slates of
electors be appointed in the manner laid out in the U.S. Constitution.
[Emphasis added.]
Notice the key line:
“State legislatures in the battleground states . . . should . . . appoint clean
slates of electors to the Electoral College to support President Trump.”
This is what the
activist conservatives in Lee’s circle were loudly, openly demanding. They
publicly endorsed a scheme to, through the power of state legislatures, convert
Biden’s electors into Trump electors. All without any of the evidence of voter
fraud Lee spent two months searching to find.
And we are now supposed
to believe that Lee was shocked that his buddies who were
willing to throw an election based on butt-dials from Rudy Giuliani would
bypass the state legislatures to make up even phonier slates of electors?
That’s a story worth
hearing. We deserve more explanation about all paths pursued to install
alternate electors. Lee should, under oath, tell it to the Jan. 6th Committee.
What’s amazing is how desperately Lee was still
trying to make Trump’s dream of flipping the election come true as late as
January 4, 2021.
That day he attended
Trump’s rally in Georgia to help “Stop the Steal” Senators David Perdue and
Kelly Loeffler get elected. There, he also met with Trump’s legal team.
According to Peril, Lee told Trump’s lawyers that they should
be making their case in courts and state legislatures, not to members of
Congress.
And the newly released
texts show Lee wrote to Meadows a lot between January 3 and January 4. He
firmly insisted to Meadows that he was helping Trump and was very upset that
people were saying otherwise. For his trouble, Trump depicted Lee as someone
who wasn’t really a team player.
At the event, Trump said: “Mike Lee is here, too. But I’m a
little angry at him today. . . . I just want Mike Lee to listen to this, what
I’m talking [about], because you know what, we need his vote.”
Lee texted Meadows:
“I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for
him. To have him take a shot at me like that in such a public setting without
even asking me about it is pretty discouraging.”
Meadows said “sorry” to
Lee and Lee, in his response, remained eager as ever to show how loyal he
remained to the cause:
It’s not your fault. But I’ve been calling
state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same
tomorrow. I’m trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend, and
this won’t make it any easier, especially if others now think I’m doing this
because he went after me. This just makes it a lot more complicated. And it was
complicated already. We need something from state legislatures to make this
legitimate and to have any hope of winning. Even if they can’t convene, it
might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a statement
indicating how they would vote.
How was it that as late as January 4 Lee was
still “trying to figure out a path that I can persuasively defend”? Remember,
by January 4, the election was decided. Trump had lost dozens of court cases.
The states had certified the elections on December 14. It was over. And still,
Lee was working his butt off trying to find any flimsy veneer of
constitutionality for Trump’s bogus claims.
And what did Lee mean
when he wrote “it might be enough if a majority of them are willing to sign a
statement indicating how they would vote”? Did he mean that if Republican state
legislators in, say, Pennsylvania and Arizona got together informally and put
their name on a something—nothing binding, just a “statement,” maybe jotted on
a bar napkin or the back of an envelope—Lee would consider that sufficient
excuse for Congress to reject those states’ official, certified results? Keep
in mind that a key suggestion in John Eastman’s short memo was to find a way to “give the
state legislatures more time to weigh in to formally support the alternate
slate of electors, if they had not already done so.”
In short: Lee outlined
paths for Trump nuts to reverse the election. But, after giving these clowns
all his attention, time, and effort, he didn’t, in the end, like how the
Trump nuts tried to reverse the election. His disagreement was about tactics,
not the mission. But his error was accepting the mission at all.
And somehow Lee’s
defenders look at this and say, “BOOM! Hands clean.”
Mike Lee may want to
pretend he had no role in this process, but the stone-cold truth is that he,
and many other conservatives, breathed life into Trump’s schemes and made the
Jan. 6th attack on the Capitol possible.