2. PUT UP OR SHUT UP

THE HOUSE REPUBLICANS WERE SCHEDULED to meet again on November 17, 2020, to elect our leadership team for the 117th Congress. There were rumors that the Freedom Caucus—a group of Republican members of the House who had become very pro-Trump—was considering nominating candidates to run against Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, or me for one of the top leadership posts.

Early in my first term, Jim Jordan, who was then chair of the Freedom Caucus, had tried to get me to join the group. Sitting down in an empty seat beside me at one of my first House Republican meetings, Jordan asked if I would consider becoming a Freedom Caucus member. Cynthia Lummis, my predecessor as Wyoming’s congresswoman, had been a member, but I had told Wyoming voters that I did not intend to join. I wasn’t comfortable with a number of things about the group, including their rule requiring every member of the caucus to support any position that was held by 80 percent of the membership. It didn’t seem right to me for a member of Congress to agree to have their vote bound by anything other than their obligations to their constituents and to the Constitution.

Jordan did make a memorable pitch to me to join the group, though. It went something like this: “Would you consider joining the Freedom Caucus? We don’t have any women, and we need one.” Tempting as this offer was, I took a pass.

My voting record was more conservative than those of many members of the Freedom Caucus, a supposedly “conservative” group. But a number of its members were hypersensitive to any criticism I made of Donald Trump. They had been grumbling about my public opposition to things such as Trump’s July 2020 suggestion that we could postpone the presidential election. They were angry when I challenged Trump’s refusal in September to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. And they seemed especially upset when I tweeted a picture of my dad wearing a mask in June of 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the caption “Real Men Wear Masks.”

As it turned out, nothing came of their threats to challenge our leadership team. Kevin McCarthy, Steve Scalise, and I were each reelected to our positions without opposition.

Later that night, Donald Trump fired Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security. Appointed by Trump himself, Krebs had spent two years working to harden America’s election systems from outside interference. In the aftermath of the election, Krebs repeatedly countered Trump’s false stolen-election claims. On November 12, Krebs had issued a joint statement with other state and federal election officials explaining that “the 2020 election was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

Trump fired Krebs via tweet, just as he had fired Defense Secretary Esper a week earlier. Trump claimed, without any evidence, that “there were massive improprieties and fraud,” and that glitches in machines had switched millions of votes from Trump to Biden.

Krebs did not go silently. After his dismissal, he confirmed repeatedly and publicly what federal and state election experts had concluded. In response, Joseph DiGenova, one of Donald Trump’s lawyers, raged in an interview that Chris Krebs should be “drawn and quartered and taken out and shot at dawn.”

The Republican National Committee headquarters occupies prestigious real estate on Capitol Hill, half a block from the Cannon House Office Building and next door to the Capitol Hill Club. On Thursday, November 19, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Joseph DiGenova, Victoria Toensing, and Boris Epshteyn—a group of lawyers representing Trump—held a press conference in the headquarters building to lay out yet more false claims of massive voter fraud. Chris Krebs called the event “the most dangerous 1 hour 45 minutes of television in American history.”

Giuliani opened the press conference by explaining that his assembled group was “representing President Trump and we’re representing the Trump campaign.” There were many lawyers working on this, he said, but “we’re the senior lawyers.” Giuliani promised that he, Powell, and Ellis were about to present “evidence we’ve collected over the last two… weeks.”

He did not do that. Instead, Giuliani proceeded to make sweeping claims that Trump had won Wisconsin “by a good margin”; that he had carried Pennsylvania by “300,000 votes”; and that there had been “overvotes in numerous precincts of 150%, 200%, and 300%” in certain Michigan and Wisconsin counties. Giuliani proclaimed 682,770 ballots cast in Pennsylvania to be “null and void.” In some precincts, he alleged, the number of votes cast was more than double the total population of those precincts.

As Rudy’s litany of lies continued under the glare of the camera lights, he began to sweat. Pulling a handkerchief from his pocket, he repeatedly wiped his face as he claimed that there was “evidence of massive fraud”—and that the election had, therefore, been “irredeemably compromised.”

As Giuliani turned to point to a map of the United States on an easel beside the podium, brown rivulets of what seemed to be hair dye streamed down the side of his face. He kept going. “In the states that we have indicated in red,” he contended, “Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, we more than double the number of votes needed to overturn the election in terms of provable illegal ballots.” His “evidence” for this massive fraud consisted of 10 affidavits. He couldn’t produce more, he said, because people feared going public, but he claimed the campaign had “a thousand, at least.” Rudy failed to explain how even 1,000 “affidavits” would be adequate to justify throwing out the votes of tens of millions of Americans. Instead, he insisted he had additional secret evidence—“aspects of this fraud that at this point I really can’t reveal.”

The hair dye dripping down his face made it challenging to focus on what Rudy was saying. But as he introduced Sidney Powell, he made this attention-grabbing pronouncement: “I don’t think most Americans know that our ballots get calculated, many of them, outside the United States… and it’s being done by a company that specializes in voter fraud.” According to Giuliani, America had used “largely a Venezuelan voting machine, in essence, to count our vote… [if] we let this happen, we are going to become Venezuela.”

What is he talking about? I thought. Was Sidney Powell going to provide evidence for this claim?

Powell stepped up to the microphone and explained that America’s entire election system had essentially been hacked by Dominion voting machines and Smartmatic technology software, which, she said, was software “created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez.” She described an “algorithm” that she said had switched votes from Trump to Biden, and that had “trashed” Trump votes. According to Powell, we learned about this only because Donald Trump got so many votes, the whole system broke. But we needed to be aware, she warned, that this same sinister “source code” resided in voting machines all across the country.

Her evidence for these assertions? “[O]ne very strong witness, who has explained how it all works.” This witness’s affidavit, she said, was attached to pleadings that lawyer Lin Wood had filed in a lawsuit in Georgia.

Then, her voice breaking with emotion, Powell said this was all “stunning, heartbreaking, infuriating, and the most unpatriotic acts I can even imagine for people in this country to have participated in…” She claimed that “President Trump won by a landslide. We are going to prove it, and we are going to reclaim the United States of America for the people who vote for freedom.”

Immediately following Powell’s remarks, Jenna Ellis stepped up to the podium to say that the assembled lawyers were an “elite strike-force team that is working on behalf of the president and the campaign.” Rudy reiterated that he and Sidney were “in charge of this investigation.”

The whole performance was too bizarre for words. My daughter Elizabeth, who had been following the litigation closely and was increasingly disgusted with what Trump’s lawyers were doing, texted me that night: “Mom, I think it’s safe to say that Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye dripping down his face today was an act of God.”

It quickly became apparent, even to hard-core Trump supporters such as Tucker Carlson, that Sidney Powell had no evidence to back up her claims. Three days after the press conference, Ellis and Giuliani issued a statement saying Sidney Powell was “not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.”

Rush Limbaugh, a steadfast Trump supporter, said of the press conference, “They promised blockbuster stuff and then nothing happened.”

Ultimately, all three of the lawyers who spoke at the press conference—Giuliani, Powell, and Ellis—would be sanctioned by courts, censured, or have their license to practice law suspended. And each would be indicted because of their lies about the election.

Sidney Powell responded to a defamation lawsuit against her by arguing that “no reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.”

Jenna Ellis admitted she engaged in “professional misconduct” by spreading falsehoods about the 2020 election, and she was censured.

And a court in New York reached this conclusion about Rudy Giuliani: “[Giuliani] communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to the courts, lawmakers, and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.”

But the damage had already been done. Millions of Americans—including tens of thousands of my own constituents—believed these lies, and they believed in the people telling them. One constituent called the performance “clear-eyed and determined.” This person said that Powell struck her as “forthright” and noted that the Trump lawyer had been “shaking with righteous anger. Very persuasive.” Then she added: “Of course the talking heads will dismiss them. F*** them.”

We were in dangerous territory. The president and his legal team were making outlandish and false claims that struck at the heart of our electoral process. Millions of Americans believed them. And the Trump campaign continued to send emails and run ads, spreading these same falsehoods all over the country. Donald Trump was doing it nearly every time he spoke publicly.

I knew how perilous this was. I knew it had to stop. The next day, November 20, I issued a statement calling on President Trump to put up or shut up:

America is governed by the rule of law. The president and his lawyers have made claims of criminality and widespread fraud, which they allege could impact election results. If they have genuine evidence of this, they are obligated to present it immediately in court and to the American people. I understand that the president has filed more than thirty separate lawsuits. If he is unsatisfied with the results in those lawsuits, then the appropriate avenue is to appeal. If the president cannot prove these claims or demonstrate that they would change the election result, he should fulfill his duty to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States by respecting the sanctity of our electoral process.

I did not know it at the time, but the lawyers in the Trump campaign and at the Trump White House agreed with me. Despite that, the intense public reaction to my statement was a sign of things to come. I heard from many constituents that they believed I was “going after Trump” and that I was betraying Wyoming. Emotions were running high.

Some of the anger stemmed from desperation about the damage Biden policies might do to our state. Our biggest industries—fossil fuels and ranching—are profoundly impacted by policies set in Washington, DC. The federal government owns nearly 50 percent of the land in Wyoming, as well as two-thirds of the state’s subsurface minerals. Whether the issue was grazing cattle on public lands, securing permits for oil and gas leasing, or sustaining our coal industry, there was a widespread sense that a Biden administration would impose policies that would ruin people’s lives. If the Democrats had truly stolen the election, as Trump and his representatives alleged, no one in Wyoming would take that lying down.

The Republican National Committee’s own lawyer, Justin Riemer, also sounded the alarm about the lies being told by the president’s lawyers. In a message to Trump spokesperson Elizabeth Harrington on November 28, Riemer said, “What Rudy and Jenna are doing is a joke and they are getting laughed out of court. They are misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is going to somehow win this thing.” He was right. Ultimately, the January 6 investigation found dozens of people in the White House, the Trump campaign, and throughout the Trump administration who agreed with what Riemer said.

A few days after I issued my November 20 statement calling on Trump to produce evidence of fraud and respect the sanctity of our elections, my chief of staff, Kara Ahern, got a call from a staffer in the White House. He informed her that I was off the guest list for the White House congressional holiday party. Invites to these parties are highly coveted by most members of Congress, but I hadn’t gone during any of the previous years I’d been in Congress, and I hadn’t planned to attend this one. I was amused that whoever gave the instruction to disinvite me thought I’d view it as a punishment.

When the news of my blacklisting broke in Politico, I got a wonderful text from my colleague Ken Buck, a congressman from Colorado who was a former prosecutor and had worked as a staffer for my father on the Iran-Contra committee in the 1980s. Ken told me he was having Christmas ornaments specially made that year bearing this Ronald Reagan quote:

To a few of us here today, this is a solemn and most momentous occasion; and yet, in the history of our Nation, it is a commonplace occurrence. The orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place as it has for almost two centuries and few of us stop to think how unique we really are. In the eyes of many in the world, this every-4-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

I wasn’t the only one who recognized how dangerous this moment was becoming. But the truth was not breaking through. Far too many people were hearing only Donald Trump’s lies. I was spending hours on the phone and in person talking to constituents about what was really happening. Conspiracy theories were everywhere, and they stretched beyond what was happening in the election. One afternoon, I called two constituents who had long been supporters of mine. They lived in different parts of Wyoming and didn’t really know each other, but they had obviously been reading the same dangerous garbage online. They both began their separate calls with me asking whether I was aware that the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court was operating a child sex-trafficking ring in his basement. Of course that’s not true, I told each of them. But how could I be sure it wasn’t true, they each wanted to know.

I was dumbfounded. These were two relatively reasonable individuals—not people I would have guessed would be susceptible to crackpot claims like this. So ludicrous was the accusation that I wasn’t sure where to begin to knock it down. It was becoming clear that the truth no longer really mattered.

When House Republicans convened by phone on December 1, Texas Representative Louie Gohmert, himself a purveyor of crackpot claims, got in the queue to speak. He had a message for me: “I want you to know,” he said, “that had I seen your statement attacking Trump, I never would have supported your reelection to leadership. I would have recruited someone to run against you.”

Sometimes it was best to let members vent in these calls or meetings with the entire Republican Conference. We did not respond to every complaint or criticism, but I decided not to let this attack stand. “Which part of the statement do you have a problem with, Louie?” I asked. “Surely you don’t disagree with the part that says America is governed by the rule of law, or the part that says claims of widespread criminality must be backed up by evidence, or the part that says the president is obligated to respect the sanctity of our election process?”

As it turned out, Louie’s commitment to those concepts was not exactly rock-solid: A few weeks later he sued Vice President Mike Pence, urging a federal court to rule that Pence could refuse to count certain states’ electoral votes when he presided over Congress’s upcoming joint session on January 6. When his lawsuit was dismissed, Gohmert claimed that the only option left was to take to the streets and get violent.

Gohmert later said that he hadn’t actually been calling for violence. But there was no question that he had been spreading the worst lies and then implying that all the institutions of American democracy had failed. Gohmert was suggesting to people that their country was being stolen from them and there was only one way to save it.