The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.
The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win. Much of the evidence has never been seen before and, in some cases, adds extraordinary new elements to the case the select committee presented in public — from voluminous phone records to contemporaneous text messages and emails….
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) strategized with Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell about her effort to help the campaign promote the notion that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud and irregularities. But Lee repeatedly pressed Mitchell on the “slippery slope” he said her arguments entailed.
“Jan. 6 is a dangerous idea,” Lee said, in a message exchange with Mitchell that she provided to the select committee. “Not just for the republic itself, but also for the president.”
Lee lamented that no court or state authority had backed Trump’s effort, so he didn’t view Congress as an appropriate backstop.
“I had somehow thought you and I agreed that we’d need something like a judgment from a court of competent jurisdiction or a decision by a state legislature,” Lee wrote.
“That was back when I believed we would get a day in court,” Mitchell replied.The two discussed a strategy to have friendly GOP senators hold election-related public hearings. Lee initially said he viewed it as a way to put an end to Jan. 6 challenges altogether — give Trump and his supporters a venue to air their frustrations without lodging actual election challenges. But Mitchell said she viewed the hearings as a prelude to the Jan. 6 challenges.
“We need to make a record,” she said, adding that she had discussed the strategy with Meadows.
Lee noted that the matters could be handled by Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Judiciary Committee or Sen. Ron Johnson’s Homeland Security Committee. But Mitchell said she viewed Johnson as a “loose cannon.”