Mike Lee Breaks Silence on White House Text Messages, Denies Backing Trump’s Effort to Overturn Election

Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah) broke his silence Wednesday on the text messages he exchanged with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in the wake of the 2020 election, telling the Salt Lake City–based Deseret News that the messages were leaked by political enemies and don’t reflect a nefarious effort on his part to overturn the election results.

The texts, which were exchanged between the 2020 election and Capitol riot, were released by CNN last week after initially being obtained by the House select committee investigating January 6.

Days after the election, Lee was encouraging the Trump campaign to explore all legal options available and even encouraged the campaign to utilize attorney Sidney Powell, sending Meadows her phone and email information and suggesting she had “a strategy to keep things alive and put several states back in play.”

After watching Powell make fantastical claims of election fraud that she was never able to substantiate, Lee said he became disillusioned.

“The things she said didn’t make a lot of sense to me,” Lee told Deseret.

As he became increasingly wary of the election fraud theories, Lee urged Meadows to provide more information to back up the claims coming from the Trump campaign’s legal team.

Lee referred to one text he sent to Meadows on November 22, 2020, which read “Please tell me what I should be saying.”

“He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is,” Lee told Deseret. “Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding.”

The texts showed that Lee initially encouraged the Trump administration to legally challenge the 2020 election results, but later pushed the White House not to undertake the effort.

Weeks after recommending Powell’s services to the Trump campaign, Lee suggested that the president disassociate himself from her because she couldn’t provide evidence to back up her sweeping election fraud claims.

Lee said he was aware of lawyer John Eastman’s theory that then-vice president Mike Pence could reject the election results if some states submitted different lists of electors. Lee added that he received a memo from Eastman on January 2 that claimed seven states were planning to send different slates of electors to Congress.

“That’s when I became alarmed,” Lee said. “Honestly, by Jan. 2, I started to think this had blown over and maybe they were not going to try this stunt that I think could be dangerous.”

That memo was previously reported in the book Peril by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. The book also said Lee and Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) personally investigated some of Trump’s claims of widespread election fraud, and concluded they were baseless.

Lee is contending in a Republican primary for the Senate midterm elections in June.

“I’m trusting that Utahns can see through his nonsense,” Lee told Deseret. “I know what happened. I know what my thoughts and intents were in doing this.”