Senator Mike Lee and Representative Chip Roy, once backers of President Donald J. Trump’s claims of a stolen election, eventually urged his top aide to change course.
WASHINGTON — For weeks in late 2020, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, cheered on President Donald J. Trump’s effort to fight his election defeat, privately offering up “a group of ready and loyal advocates who will go to bat for him.”
In text messages to Mark Meadows, then the White House chief of staff, Mr. Lee encouraged the Trump campaign to embrace Sidney Powell, a pro-Trump lawyer whom the senator described as a “straight shooter,” and said the president should “hire the right legal team and set them loose immediately.”
But when Ms. Powell put forth wild claims of foreign rigging of election machines at a widely derided news conference in November, Mr. Lee was chagrined and quietly began to question what Mr. Trump was up to.
“I’m worried about the Powell press conference,” Mr. Lee wrote in another text message to Mr. Meadows. “The potential defamation liability for the president is significant here.”
That message and several others from Mr. Lee, as well as a separate set of exchanges between Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, and Mr. Meadows, trace an about-face by the two Republican lawmakers. The pair started out as enthusiastic supporters of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about his push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed his bid to get...
A front-page article with the byline of veteran New York Times opinion writer Nicholas Kristof is the latest poisonous example of what I call the NGO “halo effect.” Headlined “The Silence That Mee...