Trying to understand Republicans is like an oceanographer peering at the water’s surface and trying to figure out what’s beneath it. I’ll give it a try.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) is a hard-right conservative who represents a deep-red state. He’s also a lawyer, and former assistant U.S. attorney and Supreme Court litigator.
Recently text messages have floated to the surface, like debris from a sunken ocean liner, revealing what was in Lee’s lawyer mind as the Trump coup attempt drama unfolded. (Read details here; a brief summary follows below.)
After the election, Sen. Lee and Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX, also a law school graduate), began messaging with Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows. CNN says Lee and Roy “initially supported legal challenges to the election but ultimately came to sour on the effort and the tactics deployed by Trump and his team,” going from “fierce advocates” to “disheartened bystanders,” and by Jan. 3 Lee was warning Meadows it “could all backfire badly.” What made them change their minds?
Lack of evidence for Trump’s claims of voting fraud.
The key differences between them and Meadows, who remained on board with Trump’s coup attempt, is that he’s not a lawyer and he’s dishonest. (Meadows, who only has a 2-year degree, misrepresented himself as a college graduate, see details here; and he’s being investigated for committing voting fraud in the 2020 election, see details here.)
Lee and Roy eventually broke with Meadows when they realized there was no evidence of fraud and Trump’s schemes to overturn the election were illegal. They had the legal background to figure that out and the ethical sense to realize it was wrong. Meadows did not. They’re out of his league.
The text messages, as I said, provide insight into their mindset and thinking. On Nov. 7, 2020, four days after the election, Lee texted Meadows offering “unequivocal support for you to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections.” This is lawyer talk. It’s also deeply revealing. One, it shows that Lee would not go outside legal and constitutional boundaries. And two, that he, like most Republicans, is deeply dissatisfied with our election system.
In that regard, Republicans dislike efforts to boost voter registrations or election turnouts by the methods favored by liberals and Democrats, such as automatic registration, extended voting, mail voting, drop boxes, etc. — despite there being no evidence these features of our voting system weaken election integrity or lead to more voting fraud, which in any case reputable studies have repeatedly shown is extremely rare. But instead of arguing there’s a problem, which they can’t because there isn’t, they attack those efforts by contending that Republican voters’ belief our elections aren’t fair makes them unfair. That’s like saying if you don’t have appendicitis, but are convinced you do, your doctor has to operate on you.
It’s a stupid argument that doesn’t deserve the time of day; absent something actually wrong with our elections, there’s no justification for their efforts to make voting harder and less accessible, and Democrats correctly see that as voter suppression and dirty pool. To their discredit, Lee and Roy remain on board to this day with their party’s undemocratic efforts to restrict voting access.
But I’m digressing. At first, Lee saw Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, too, as being “about the fundamental fairness and integrity of our election system,” and urged him to “keep fighting.” Thus, “fairness and integrity” is the lens through which he views election matters. But by Nov. 7, Roy was asking Meadows for “fraud examples.” There would never be any, either then or later.
Lee’s spokesman pointed out to CNN that “Lee had called for an investigation into claims of fraud in the 2020 election but ultimately recognized Biden as president-elect and voted to certify the electoral results on January 6.” In other words, Lee the Lawyer, and Republican senator, was suspicious of the election results, but seeing no evidence of fraud, hewed to what the law demands by acknowledging that Biden had won.
Trump, Meadows, and most of their party and voters would not. They chose to embrace Trump’s baseless lies over the rule of law.
To be sure, Lee was willing to stretch to the very boundaries of the law. He pushed Meadows to get now-discredited lawyer Sidney Powell an interview with Trump because, “Apparently she has a strategy to keep things alive and put several states back in play,” and even called her “a straight shooter,” which she emphatically was not. (Powell is now being sued for defamation by the voting machine companies she slandered, and facing the prospect of disbarment.)
At the same time, Roy wanted Meadows to urge Trump 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.” That, of course, didn’t happen. Instead, on Nov. 19 Trump’s legal team (then consisting of Guiliani, Powell, and Jenna Ellis) staged the “now-infamous news conference [that] laid out a series of false claims and conspiracy theories about alleged voter fraud,” the ultimate result of which would be the violent Jan. 6 insurrection.
Later that day, Nov. 19, Roy texted Meadows the following: “Hey brother – we need substance or people are going to break.” Two hours later, Lee texted Meadows that “he was worried about the Powell press conference.”
Following this, Lee and Roy nearly tipped off the rails by deciding to back a scheme, hatched by erstwhile Trump lawyer John Eastman, to replace Biden electors with Trump electors, which a federal judge recently called “planning a crime.” (Eastman hasn’t been indicted — yet.) But they continued to insist the Trump team produce facts to back up their fraud allegations, and by mid-December they were questioning the scheme. Lee then texted Meadows, “I think we’re now passed the point where we can expect anyone will do it without … a strong evidentiary argument.” There would never be one, because the alleged fraud didn’t happen.
Two weeks later, on Dec. 31, Roy texted Meadows, “The president should call everyone off. It’s the only path,” and argued against “destroying” the Electoral College; and on Jan. 3, Lee texted to Meadows that the scheme was illegitimate. Lee warned Meadows, “I only know that this will end badly for the President unless we have the Constitution on our side. And unless these states submit new slates of Trump electors pursuant to state law, we do not.” This was, once again, their lawyer instincts keeping them on the right side of legality, if just barely.
On Jan. 6, with the Trump-incited riot erupting outside, both Lee in the Senate, and Roy in the House, voted to certify Biden’s election win. Later, Roy said on the House floor, “The President should never have spun up certain Americans to believe something that simply cannot be,” and texted Meadows one final time: “This is a sh*tshow. Fix this now.” But Meadows could not, and would not, because Trump wouldn’t let him.
Trump, who cares only about himself, dragged his party down a rabbit hole of illegality and violence, and into infamy. He, and Meadows too, are hopelessly dishonest and seditious; there’s no cure for bad character when people don’t want to be cured.
In the end, Lee and Roy refused to make that journey with them; being lawyers, they demanded facts and respected the rule of law, and were unwilling to sign up for a paranoid fantasy. Like Trump and Meadows, they’re highly partisan Republicans, but perhaps it was their lawyer instincts that saved them from character extinction. It’s hard to say for sure, because so many lawyers in Trump’s orbit did go down that rabbit hole, and now may face professional extinction.
Related story: A Salt Lake newspaper wants Lee to come clean about how far he went down that rabbit hole before turning around and coming out. Read their editorial here.