With more than a year’s distance between us and the effort by Donald Trump and his nebulous ring of allies and abetters to overturn his 2020 electoral loss, we’ve reached a point where each new revelation about just what was happening behind the seditious scenes is both shocking in the specific, and utterly unsurprising as part of a larger, extremely obvious whole. Yes, of course the White House was running a full court press to pressure states into essentially flipping on his behalf — we all know the broad contours of what was happening, and are now in the business of filling in the various details and linkages within that broader framework.
So it is with CNN’s newly published tranche of messages between Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee, and Mark Meadows, the last and most obsequious of Trump’s many chiefs-of-staff. In text after awkwardly phrased text, Lee presses Meadows on Trump’s ongoing effort to overturn the election results, showing an eager willingness to go along with the scheme, while simultaneously worrying about a lack of any tangible evidence to support the effort.
