GOP’s Mike Lee isn’t done with weird Jan. 6 conspiracy theories
As yesterday got underway on Capitol Hill, Politico’s Playbook, a widely read daily newsletter, briefly noted that Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah “reposted a suggestion that the RNC pipe bomb was a false flag.”
Seeing this, I hoped that Politico had simply made a mistake. Alas, it hadn’t.
Jan. 6, 2021, is remembered as the day Donald Trump deployed a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, but the night before the insurrectionist riot, someone left pipe bombs outside the national headquarters of the Democratic and Republican parties. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but three years later, the culprit still hasn’t been identified or arrested.
It was against this backdrop that a far-right media personality published a message to social media suggesting it might’ve been the FBI that planted the pipe bombs as part of some plot. Lee, a sitting U.S. senator and member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently concluded on Wednesday night that it was a message worth promoting.
This comes just two months after the same Utah Republican also used social media to suggest at least some pro-Trump Jan. 6 rioters were undercover federal agents.
A week later, the senator conceded to HuffPost that he was probably mistaken about one of the men he focused on. That said, Lee’s original online content still hasn’t been taken down, and the senator has never made any effort to explain his support for fringe misinformation.
What’s more, this keeps happening. Last August, commenting on Covid-related lockdowns that did not and will not exist, the Utah Republican decided to amplify unfounded allegations from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ InfoWars website.
A couple of days later, Deputy White House Press Secretary Andrew Bates told Lee via social media, “Senator, this is completely false. Respectfully, we’d urge you to double-check before sharing misinformation from a source that now has to pay tens of millions of dollars for spreading some of the most painful lies imaginable.”
Evidently, Lee did not learn from the experience.
The Bulwark’s Charlie Sykes recently reflected on Lee’s “strange, twisted journey.”
By now it is a story as old as time. A once-respected, apparently normal Republican politician looks in the mirror one day and decides, to hell with it, I’m going all in on the insanity. Somewhere in the mists of the Before Times, Mike Lee was a simulacrum of a serious conservative. But there is no longer any incentive to try to sound like William F. Buckley Jr., so Lee has decided to follow ElonAlexJonesTuckerMTGTrump into the feculent bog of conspiracism. Actually, he dove in face-first.
Revisiting our earlier coverage, I continue to find these evolutions jarring. No one ever accused Lee of being a moderate GOP voice, but he presented himself as something of an intellectual. There was even some discussion in the not-too-distant past that the senator actually wanted to be considered for the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lee held a safe seat in a reliably “red” state; he knew he’d probably never face a credible primary challenge; and he didn’t have any obvious incentives to go off the deep end.
And yet, we now see the senator amplifying Infowars and peddling bizarre Jan. 6 conspiracy theories.
It’s not too late for Lee to start working his way back to more sensible waters, but by all appearances, the Utahan has no interest in doing so.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
