Will the media let Sen. Mike Lee go unquestioned?

Will the media let Sen. Mike Lee go unquestioned?

James Downie — Read time: 3 minutes

Yesterday at 6:22 p.m. EDT

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill on April 7. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Earlier this month, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) became the fourth of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump last year to announce his retirement. On Sunday, Upton and NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd discussed the lawmaker’s career and why he is stepping down. Those reasons included the prospect of running in a newly drawn congressional district and the chance to spend more time with his family.

But another factor — and one for which media luminaries such as Todd are partly responsible — went unmentioned: the kid-gloves treatment of those Republicans who weren’t so principled, such as Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).

On Friday, CNN released more than 100 text messages from Lee and Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), sent between the 2020 election and Jan. 6, 2021, to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. In the election’s immediate aftermath, both Lee and Roy encouraged Trump and his aides to overturn the results.

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As Trump and associates such as his attorney Rudy Giuliani beclowned themselves with conspiracy theories, Lee and Roy became more critical of the election subversion efforts. But both men still advocated for conservative lawyer John Eastman’s plan to have Republican-controlled state legislatures submit alternate slates of electoral college delegates and then have Vice President Mike Pence refuse to certify Joe Biden’s win.

In the days leading up to Jan. 6, however, Roy recognized the dangers of this plot. “The president should call everyone off,” he texted Meadows on Dec. 31. “It’s the only path. If we substitute the will of states through electors with a vote by Congress every 4 years … we have destroyed the electoral college.”

Lee, however, continued searching for some justification for Eastman’s approach. “I’ve been calling state legislators for hours today,” he told Meadows on Jan. 4. “We need something from state legislatures to make this legitimate and to have any hope of winning.” When no state legislature was forthcoming, and Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Lee did vote to certify the results.

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But since then, as Amanda Carpenter and others noted, Lee has downplayed his earlier efforts, telling CBS’s Robert Costa and The Post’s Bob Woodward that he only learned of Eastman’s idea on Jan. 2.

So a Republican senator — a self-proclaimed “constitutional conservative,” no less — misled the country about his participation in a plot to overturn a presidential election. And yet not one of the five major Sunday talk shows mentioned one word about Lee. (CNN’s “State of the Union” had a good excuse: Almost its entire run-time was dedicated to an interview with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.) But the other four — “Meet the Press,” ABC’s “This Week,” CBS’s “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday” — couldn’t find time for one question, let alone one segment, about Lee.

It is not the media’s job to reflexively boost Republicans who stand up to Trump. Most of the current coverage that portrays Pence and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as brave holdouts against the Trump mob frequently omits the many lows from the rest of their careers.

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But in a functioning democracy, it is the media’s job to call out those who scheme to subvert that democracy. This isn’t a partisan issue: Even a majority of Republicans agree that Pence did not have the power to overturn the election as he presided over the Senate. Roy can at least argue that he abandoned such efforts as the stakes became clear to him. Lee not only persisted, but also then tried to cover his tracks about what he did. Yet that perversion of public service is barely a blip on the political media’s radar.

Since Upton and nine of his Republican colleagues voted to impeach Trump, they’ve received death threats and harassment, and almost all of those who aren’t retiring are facing serious primary challenges. That’s enough to make any member of Congress doubt the value of public service. But it certainly doesn’t help when Lee and others who aided the same plot Upton and his colleagues considered impeachable are treated so mildly. What’s the point of standing for principle, after all, if those who don’t get away so easily?