How the January 6th Committee succeeded in uncovering GOP Senator Mike Lee’s incriminating text messages

| 4:38 pm EDT April 15, 2022
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Today CNN published text messages from Republican Senator Mike Lee to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, revealing that Lee heavily pushed Meadows to have then-President Donald Trump hire Sidney Powell to lead the charge in trying to overturn the 2020 election results.

These incriminating text messages did not get picked up by a gust of wind and randomly land on a CNN reporter’s desk. There had to be a source who provided these texts to CNN, and for a specific reason. Given that Mike Lee would never have given his own incriminating texts to CNN, the only other entity known to be in possession of such text messages is the January 6th Committee. Back when Meadows briefly cooperated, he reportedly turned over all of his electronic communications from the time period of the 2020 election. This would have included the texts that Lee sent to Meadows about Powell.

In other words, it’s overwhelmingly likely that the January 6th Committee had these Mike Lee texts all along, and has now decided to leak them to CNN so that they would be publicly reported. Why would the committee do this?

First, the committee’s public hearings are now scheduled to begin in late May or early June, and a scandalous leak like this helps get the general public interested in the scandal and therefore more likely to want to tune in. Second, average Americans in the middle are going to be more likely to take Mike Lee’s incriminating texts seriously if they initially learn about it from the media, than if they initially learn about it from a congressional committee mostly made up of members of the opposing party.

Keep in mind what this means. When the January 6th Committee got the DOJ to indict Steve Bannon for criminal contempt, it scared Mark Meadows into briefly cooperating for fear of also getting indicted for contempt. Even though Meadows ended up breaking off that cooperation, he first turned over a broad treasure trove of evidence against himself and numerous other people, which included Mike Lee’s incriminating text messages. So the committee got to Mike Lee by targeting Steve Bannon. That’s how these probes succeed in general. And of course the committee is surely still sitting on a metric ton of incriminating evidence against others in Trump’s orbit, all of which will become public knowledge during the upcoming public hearings.