Sitting senator shown to have colluded in coup attempt. Sunday shows yawn
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Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee was up to his eyeballs in the conspiracy committed to overturning the 2020 presidential election—the same Lee who sits on the Senate Judiciary committee and lectures much smarter, much more patriotic people on how the Constitution works.
Lee is also a liar. A liar smart enough to know that his “14 hours a day” spent trying to figure out how to overthrow the government and keep Trump installed in the White House was did not look good for him after the events of Jan. 6, so he lied about it. The newly revealed text messages between the senator and then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows prove that Lee had been pushing the plot by John Eastman to get Republican state legislators to toss their election results and appoint their own pro-Trump electors since Nov. 23, 2020.
”If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path,” Lee texted Meadows on Nov. 23, when the counting had all been done. When Joe Biden had secured the office. But that’s not what he told Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their recent book about the events leading up to Jan. 6. He told Woodward and Costa that the first he’d ever heard about “alternate electors” plot was on Jan. 2 and that “he was shocked.” That fact, interestingly enough, was picked up and tweeted extensively by former Texas Sen. Ted Cruz communications official Amanda Carpenter, who apparently has a bone to pick with the former Cruz sidekick.
Wow, a sitting senator who plotted for weeks to overthrow the will of the people, fueling the insurrection and then lying about it? Big news, right? Not at all. “[N]ot one of the five major Sunday talk shows mentioned one word about Lee,” writes the Washington Post’s James Downie. “Will the media let Sen. Mike Lee go unquestioned?” Downie asks. Why yes, yes they will.
Sign now: Remove election-denier Mike Lee from Senate Judiciary Committee
The national media, anyway. He might have a harder time with the Utah press, which immediately jumped on the story. Lee is up for reelection this year, and the press back home might just have found their storyline for their primary coverage.
But the Kool Kids of the D.C. media? As Downie says, they instead seem to think it’s their “job to reflexively boost Republicans who stand up to Trump. Most of the current coverage that portrays Pence and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as brave holdouts against the Trump mob frequently omits the many lows from the rest of their careers.”
An illustrative example of just how much the national media does not want to deal with Republicans colluding on a coup is that other batch of Meadows’ texts, the ones with Ginni Thomas, who is the wife of sitting Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, conspiring on an insurrection. The same Supreme Court justice who refuses to recuse himself from any case involving his wife’s activities, including the attempted violent overthrow of the government.
Are reporters asking anyone about the need to do something about this? Nope.
Here’s a self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative” who loves to argue when his cosplaying law professor that “Of course, we’re not a democracy” conspiring to overturn the will of the people, the government, the constitution.
So, yes, he really should be asked about that by the traditional media. That doesn’t mean he will be.
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