Sen. Mike Lee is betraying his country, still hiding what he knows about a violent coup

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There’s a pretty straightforward way to determine which Republican lawmakers were themselves conned by the “election fraud” hoaxes that led directly to an attempted coup, and which were co-conspirators in those efforts. If you’re a Republican aware of information relevant to how Donald Trump and his allies attempted the nullification of Trump’s election loss but you refuse to talk about what you know, you’re a co-conspirator. The cover-up is equivalent to the crime. There’s not any room for ambiguity on this one; hiding evidence is an act to ally with the coup, and an act intended to pave the way for such a thing to happen again.

Utah Sen. Mike Lee communicated with the White House in the run-up to the coup, proposing that “alternative slates of delegates” be sent by the states that would claim to be the real electors, pushing the White House to use the crackpot hoax promoter Sidney Powell to help push the plot, and publicly pushing the notion that there was “fraud” in the United States presidential election despite knowing, we can be sure, that there was not a damn bit of evidence for such a democracy-shaking claim. And now he’s clamming up tight, refusing to answer questions about any of that, and that puts Sen. Mike Lee squarely in the camp of co-conspirator.

He could explain what he knows or he could boost the cover-up, and Mike Lee made his choice many months back.

The Salt Lake Tribune is entirely fed up with their sedition-backing senator at this point, and in a Tuesday editorial demanded Lee “start fessing up to all he knows about the plot to set aside the results of an honest and fair election to keep Donald Trump in power.” He needs to explain his knowledge of those events to “his constituents,” to “the House committee” investigating the coup, and to “history,” says the Tribune.

If the editorial is blistering it is likely because it still seems unimaginable to most Americans that top Republican Party hacks would both support an attempt to nullify a United States election and, after the coup failed, devote themselves to hiding whatever evidence they could hide. But here we are, and Mike Lee is a key witness to an attempted coup that relied on promoting an utterly fraudulent hoax calling the election into question so that Republican lawmakers could simply toss aside whatever state electors needed to be tossed aside in order to declare that Donald Trump “won” regardless of the vote totals.

He is not alone. The Republican lawmakers who have taken direct steps to block America from knowing how the coup attempt was planned and executed include approximately All Of Them, which is how we know we are in a true fascist moment and not just cleaning up the aftermath of one particularly corrupt and hoax-promoting jackass. The party’s attacks on the few Republicans in Congress and in the states who are supporting efforts to expose the details speak for themselves.

And, of course, all of this would become moot if the Republican base, the Republican voters who put Sen. Mike Lee and the others in power and could just as easily throw him back out, thought an attempt to end democracy itself was a scandal that they could not themselves abide. On the contrary, most Republican voters adhere to the Fox News belief that Republican power should take what Republican power can, and if the majority of voters vote against Republican policies then it is the voting that needs to stop, not the policies.

That is why we need to keep our contempt for seditionists front and center, and why it is important to call seditionists like Sen. Mike Lee out for what they are. It would be lovely if so-called political journalism could stomach taking a stand on something as profound as should propaganda be used to erase our democracy, and perhaps they can be eventually humiliated into it, but “political” journalism is where reporters and pundits land when their most central journalistic belief is that they themselves should be on television; crime reporting is needed here, not access-based fluffery. An attempt was made to block the constitutional transfer of power. It began with propaganda, was built into a “march” aimed directly at obstructing the lawful counting of electors, and ended with violence targeting the Congress itself. Mike Lee can f–k himself if he thinks he can stand silently to see how it all shakes out and pretend, even for a moment, at being a patriot.

He is looking to survive after helping to plot a coup, to be sure. But he’s not sorry he participated in it. He could make the case that he was conned by Republican hoax-promoters but could no longer abide those acts when it became clear the hoaxers were lying about their claims, but he’s not saying that either—because admitting the hoax would, of course, enrage all the other Republicans who participated in it. So he clams up, he runs from reporters, and he ignores all those who ask him to explain just what he knows about an attempted erasure of our democracy.

He has no claim to innocence on this one. Mike Lee was a co-conspirator to a coup, and his loyalty to that coup continues.

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