Five years on, Mike Lee still won't explain his Jan. 6 role

It’s been five years since a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win. One thing hasn’t changed: Utah Sen. Mike Lee still hasn’t answered for his role in the scheme to overturn that election—and the record shows he wasn’t a bystander.

Lee was a key player in the lead-up—advising, assisting, and pressure-testing ways to toss out Biden’s win. He’s never fully answered for it.

The evening of Jan. 6, after the attack had ended and the rioters left, I had a text message exchange with Sen. Lee while he was on the floor of the Senate. During that exchange, he revealed to me that amid the chaos, he received a phone call from President Trump, who was actually looking for Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville.

There was a lot of noise and commotion in the room, but I thought I heard him say “How’s it going, Tommy?”

I said, “Mr. President, this is Mike Lee.”

“No,” he insisted, “I dialed Tommy’s number.”

“Mr. President, are you calling for Tommy Tuberville (my new colleague from Alabama)?”

“Yes.”

Anxious to hand the phone to someone else (and not have to argue with the president about matters at hand), I asked if he’d like me to find Senator Tuberville.

He said, “Yeah sure, that’d be great.”

I went and found Senator Tuberville, handed him my phone, and explained that the president would like to speak to him. I stood nearby for the next five or ten minutes as they spoke, not wanting to lose my phone in the middle of a crisis.

My story about the exchange was cited in the final report from the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. The fact that Trump was calling senators mid-riot should have set off sirens.

Lee’s behavior after the attack was revealing, too. After the House impeached Trump a second time for inciting the attack on the Capitol, Lee told Fox News that Trump deserved a “mulligan.” Lee also met privately with Trump’s legal team during the Senate impeachment trial, even though he would help render a verdict as a juror in the case. During the trial, Lee loudly objected when the phone call from Trump was introduced into evidence.

The first real inkling that Lee played a part in Trump’s scheme to remain in the White House came later that year in September. Bob Woodward and Robert Costa reported in their book, “Peril,” that Lee investigated Trump’s false claims that massive voter fraud was the reason for his loss. They also reported that Lee received a confidential memo from the White House, authored by John Eastman, that if a handful of states sent slates of “dueling electors” to Congress, then-Vice President Mike Pence could throw those results out, handing the election to Trump.

On Jan. 27, Lee told an online town hall he’d made “phone call after phone call” to state officials about alternate electors—and quit only when none would go along.

In April of 2022, the full scope of Lee’s part in trying to help Trump reverse his election loss started to come into focus. In a bombshell story, CNN published leaked text messages between Lee and then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. Those texts put Lee inside the fake elector push from day one:

• Lee’s efforts to help Trump started on Nov. 7, 2020, the day after Biden was declared the winner of the election. Lee sent Meadows a letter signed by several prominent conservative organizations urging Trump’s team to “exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy” while challenging the results.
• Lee helped Sidney Powell gain access to the Trump White House. He would later walk back his support for Powell after a disastrous press conference where Powell alleged Trump’s defeat was orchestrated by a secret cabal that included George Soros and Hugo Chavez (who was dead). According to Powell, this shadowy group rigged voting machines to make sure Trump lost.

Most damning: Lee begged Meadows for marching orders.

“Please tell me what I should be saying,” Lee texted on Nov. 20.

Those text messages also revealed Lee knew about the Eastman memo much earlier than he had claimed. He told Woodward and Costa that he learned about Eastman’s proposal on Jan. 2 and was “surprised” by the plan. In reality, Lee was one of the first people to make the White House aware of Eastman’s idea, texting Meadows on Nov. 27, 2020, “(John) Eastman has some really interesting research on this. The good news is is (sic) that Eastman is proposing an approach that unlike what Sidney Powell has propose (sic) could be examined very quickly.”

Lee has repeatedly claimed that he was merely investigating “rumors” that some states were considering sending alternate slates of electors to Congress, but the final report from the House Jan. 6th Committee tells a different story, noting Lee “spent a month encouraging the idea of having State legislatures endorse competing electors for Trump.” He backed off only when it was clear Trump couldn’t stay in office without breaking the Constitution.

Lee was in frequent communication with top Trump campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell as they desperately tried to convince Republican officials in states carried by Joe Biden to put forward a competing slate of electors. Mitchell was part of the infamous phone call where Trump urged Georgia election officials to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner of that state.

Mitchell urged Lee to schedule a hearing in the Senate on Trump’s falsehoods about election fraud.

“We need a day in the court of public opinion,” Mitchell said.

“If we could pull this off, might it obviate the need for the January 6 strategy?” Lee replied, referencing the alternate elector gambit.

“It is part of the strategy. To provide factual support for rejecting certain troublesome electors. That’s the point.” Mitchell replied.

Lee agreed to pitch Sen. Lindsey Graham on the idea, but the hearing never materialized.

By late December, Lee could see the alternate elector plot was collapsing.

On Dec. 30, Lee texted Mitchell, “I don’t think we have any valid basis for objecting to electors.”

“It cannot be true that we can object to any state’s presidential electors simply because we don’t think they handled their election well or suspect illegal activity.”

Despite that realization, Lee was still frenziedly trying to make the fake elector plot work. On Jan. 4, 2021, Lee texted Meadows that he was “spending 14 hours a day” on the fake elector plan, but was not finding anyone willing to go along.

“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. And I’ve been working on doing that all day today,” Lee told Meadows.

When Lee realized that Trump’s team was moving forward with the plan to have members of Congress object to electoral results without competing electors, Lee warned Mitchell that it could lead to unforeseen circumstances.

“Will you please explain to me how this doesn’t create a slippery slope problem for all future presidential elections?” Lee texted.

Lee’s story about his involvement in the plot to overturn the 2020 election has shifted several times.

When the text messages between Lee and Meadows first leaked, I attempted to ask him about them at a Republican party event in Summit County. Lee refused to answer, and his aides blocked me as he ran and made his getaway. You can see the video below.

A few days later, Lee claimed in an interview with the Deseret News that, despite the text messages with Meadows, he was not doing the bidding of the White House. Instead, he claimed the text messages were being used out of context for “political motives.”

A few days later at the GOP State Convention, Lee changed his story, saying that he was merely urging the White House to pursue every avenue available to challenge the election results.

“I knew what a disaster Joe Biden would be,” Lee said. “I encouraged the Trump campaign, and the president himself, to acknowledge that he’d accept whatever the outcome of the Electoral College was.”

During an October 2022 debate against independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin, Lee denied he “supported or ever did support a fake electors plot,” and said allegations he was involved was a “reckless disregard for the truth.”

Five years later, the texts and the January 6 Committee record flatly contradict that.