Back in October, during a particularly spicy exchange during the U.S. Senate debate, Evan McMullin went after Utah Sen. Mike Lee for taking an active role in the plot to overturn the presidential election by ginning up alternate slates of electors for Donald Trump.
“Senator Lee, that was the most egregious betrayal of our nation’s Constitution by a U.S. Senator in our history,” McMullin charged, “and it will be your legacy.”
Lee, taking umbrage at the accusation, responded, “You know that’s not true, sir. You owe me an apology.”
He went on to allege all he did in the run-up to the Jan. 6 ransacking of the Capitol was make some phone calls to find out if any states were going to change electors and, when he learned they were not, voted to certify the election.
We knew at the time, based on text messages Lee sent to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, that the Utahn had played a bigger role than he’d described on the debate stage.
But — as my colleague Bryan Schott first reported on Twitter — a newly released House Jan. 6 Committee deposition of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer on Donald Trump’s campaign team offers new revelations that show Lee, not as a curious observer, but the brainchild and major player in the alternate elector idea.
“It actually was Mike Lee’s idea,” Mitchell asserted.
It was Lee, she said, who organized a Zoom meeting with members of Congress where Mitchell laid out the notion that Georgia’s election was fraudulent — claims the Trump campaign was unable to prove in court.
Mitchell told investigators that she asked the White House to organize alternate slates of electors largely to satisfy Lee’s belief that the alternate electors appointed by legislatures were critical to his ability to reject the election results.
Lee told her, she said, that the alternate electors “seems to be the sweet spot for getting my colleagues to engage.” Lee made a similar argument in text messages to Meadows.
Indeed the Trump team, along with members of Congress and the Republican National Committee, worked aggressively, according to the House report, to recruit illegitimate electors, an effort led personally by Trump and Meadows.
It was obviously illegal, but it didn’t stop the Trump team from trying to deliver fake certifications to former Vice President Mike Pence.
All of this flowed from the “alternate elector” theory — and whose idea was it? When investigators asked Mitchell if she hatched the plan, she was direct: “It wasn’t my idea,” she responded. “It was actually Mike Lee’s idea.”
It wasn’t just his idea. The House committee’s final report states that Lee had “spent a month encouraging the idea of having State legislatures endorse competing electors for Trump.”
So, based on what we have learned, here’s what the record appears to show:
Mike Lee came up with the alternate electors idea
Lee promoted it to the White House with the introduction of attorney John Eastman, who drafted a memo on the legality of the scheme and who the House committee recommended be criminally charged;
Lee arranged briefings with his fellow senators to drum up support for the notion;
And, according to his own text messages, Lee spent hours calling state legislators and spent “14 hours a day” working on Trump’s behalf, trying to keep him in office.
Now, of course, it didn’t work. So Lee now pats himself on the back for voting to certify the results — much the same way a would-be bank robber who couldn’t crack the safe technically didn’t rob a bank.
It is clear — and becoming clearer with each rock that gets turned over — that Lee, at a minimum, attempted to subvert democracy and, for the only time in our history, put an unelected president in power.
The more we learn the clearer it becomes that any attempt on his behalf to claim anything to the contrary is best met with his own protest during the Senate debate: You know that’s not true, sir. You owe Utahns an apology.
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