Utah media shows D.C. press how it's done in holding Mike Lee accountable for 2020 election plotting
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It’s been a rough week for Sen. Mike Lee of Utah thanks to a dogged Utah press corps that isn’t nearly as quick as the D.C. press gang to ignore his efforts to help the former squatter in the Oval Office have a coup. While not a single one of the network Sunday shows even mentioned the existence of Lee’s barrage of text messages plotting with Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, the press back home cares.
Like Bryan Schott of the Salt Lake Tribune, who tried valiantly to get Lee to answer his questions about Lee’s texts on the plot. Not only would Lee not answer him, his staff blocked Schott from following Lee to try to get him to talk.
Schott’s persistence, and some bad local press, ended up sending Lee to a rival paper, the Deseret News, after it published a story saying that Lee had some explaining to do about statements he made last year in a lengthy interview about the 2020 election. In Lee’s response, he tried to minimize his plotting against America. He said it was all just chatting with Meadows, an old friend.
“He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is,” Lee told Deseret News in a phone interview later that same day. “Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding,” Lee said of his conversations with Meadows.
He’s playing the victim, of course, saying the texts are being taken out of context for “political motives” and were “leaked” to maximize damage in his primary campaign. It would be interesting to have Lee explain how this statement about his trying to get state legislators to overturn the election could be explained in any other context: “I’ve been spending 14 hours a day for the last week trying to unravel this for him. … I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today, and am going to spend hours doing the same tomorrow.” Or this one: “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.”
Lee also refused in that interview to say whether Biden was elected in a free and fair election. “President Biden is the president of the United States,” Lee answered. “We know that he is the president of the United States because the Electoral College met on Dec. 14 and then cast electoral votes. Those electoral votes signaled the victory for President Biden.” He refused to refute the Big Lie in this interview. Pressed about whether he thought there was fraud in the 2020 election, Lee just said, “I’ve answered your question.”
He also kind of maybe lied again. “From the outset of this, I spent an enormous amount of time doing my job with only one objective in mind. Particularly once the electoral votes were cast, my objective was to figure out what, if any role, Congress had,” Lee said. Because what he was telling Meadows was that he was spending an enormous amount of time—14 hours a day—trying to convince Republican state legislators to cheat. Which he also denies. “At no point in any of those was I engaging in advocacy. I wasn’t in any way encouraging them to do that. I just asked them a yes or no question,” he said. He didn’t explain why it took 14 hours a day to get a handful of legislators in the swing states that voted for Biden where he told Meadows he was making the calls to say yes or no.
As Tribune reporter Schott tweeted in a must-read thread picking apart Lee’s assertions, “The explanations he offers are wholly inadequate, and raise so many new questions.”
Schott isn’t the only one looking for answers from Lee. So are Jan. 6 survivors, who met with Lee and other Republican senators in May 2021 to ask them to back legislation forming an independent commission to investigate Jan. 6. That clearly didn’t work, and Lee told the group he felt it would be too “partisan.” The survivors—former D.C. Police Officer Mike Fanone; Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn; Sandra Garza, the girlfriend of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died on Jan. 7; and Gladys Sicknick, Brian’s mother—were frustrated with Lee then. Now, they tell Rolling Stone, they’re furious.
“I never had a particularly high opinion of politicians,” Fanone says. “I’m not shocked that I sat in a room across from somebody while I showed them body worn camera footage of myself almost being beaten to death by Trump supporters on January 6 and then had them lie to my face.” He added, “Mike Lee is not a politician. He’s a criminal suspect.” Garza blasted Lee and other Republicans for trying “to cover their tracks.”
“They knew that it was going to open up a lot of stuff that would look bad for them because they were doing stuff behind the scenes,” Garza says. She said Lee’s excuses to them in that meeting last year now seem, in retrospect after the release of these texts, a “pathetic” attempt to cover up his complicity. “He defaulted to that … ‘Oh, let’s just focus on the failures of the [Capitol Police] leadership or the failures of the other law-enforcement agencies so we can take the focus off me, my colleagues, and Trump,’” Garza says. “That’s all that was.” She’s particularly angry about Lee’s “14 hours a day” text. “I’m curious if he was putting any of that effort in trying to comfort any of the families of the officers who committed suicide shortly after the 6th, and I know he wasn’t,” Garza says of Lee.
Gladys Sicknick wants Lee in front of the House Jan. 6 committee, saying it would be a “dereliction” of duty if he doesn’t testify. “Senator Lee is in a position to assist the process of determining what happened at the Capitol. I think that he, along with other officials, are duty-bound to offer testimony to the January 6th Commission as it seeks to establish whether what occurred was spontaneous, or a carefully planned insurrection,” Sicknick wrote. “It’s my hope that Mr. Lee will willingly and truthfully participate in the Congressional inquiry, according to his Oath to the Constitution.”
Fanone agrees, though he’s a little more blunt about it. “What we’re dealing with right now is unprecedented in American history,” Fanone says. “I think that we need to set aside all of the pomp and circumstance and actually just enforce the fucking law.”
This is an important and, frankly, juicy story that a D.C. press corps worth whatever it is they’re getting paid should be all over. Because every time Lee opens his mouth, he’s telling another lie. Because he swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same,” an oath that he has broken.
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