ON JAN. 4, DONALD TRUMP arrived in Dalton, Ga., to campaign for incumbent Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. “Macho Man” by the Village People blared through the speakers, and some 20,000 ralliers cheered as Marine One pulled up behind the stage. As the president stepped out of the helicopter, the music switched to Lee Greenwood’s baritone voice: ‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom, and they can’t take that away.

The audience erupted as Trump fist-pumped, then clapped, then fist-pumped again. Sen. Mike Lee and his wife, Sharon, stood in the front row, clapping as the president paced around the stage. Trump waited until the Greenwood recording was well past the first chorus, and the crowd belt out “God bless the U.S.A” in unison. As he stepped to the podium, the rallygoers chanted “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

“I want to thank you very much,” he said. “Hello, Georgia.” The audience erupted again, but Trump didn’t wait for them to quiet down before continuing. “By the way, there’s no way we lost Georgia. There’s no way.” They screamed again. “That was a rigged election. But we’re still fighting in it. You’ll see what’s going to happen.”

Sen. Lee knew all about that “fight.” While on this trip to Georgia, he met with members of Trump’s legal team and heard their arguments. He was doing his own research, too, and he became more and more convinced that the legal team had no leg to stand on — and even if they did, there was little Lee and his Senate colleagues could do. 

Trump’s subsequent 80 minutes at the podium included a handful of references to Loeffler and Perdue, jabs at Biden and the “radical liberal agenda,” and more discussion of the “rigged” presidential election. “I’ve had two elections,” he said, “and I’ve won both of them.”

As Trump talked about the GOP’s gains in down-ballot races (“We won 25 out of 26 House tossup races”), he noticed the Lees. “Hello, Mike,” he said. “How are you, Mike?”

He then returned to discussing New York’s 22nd Congressional District race without missing a beat, then jumped to the press (met with booing from the crowd), a Democrat-controlled Senate (more boos), and Stacey Abrams (the loudest boos). He then turned to a number of VIPs in attendance, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (who received some of the loudest cheers of the night). 

“And Mike Lee is here, too,” the president added, almost passively. “But I’m a little angry at him today.”

The crowd laughed. Days earlier, Lee forwarded a statement from Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) to many of his Senate colleagues that opposed plans to challenge the election. While Lee, to that point, hadn’t formally announced his plan, it seemed to rub Trump the wrong way. “Where’s Mike Lee? Where is he? I’m a little angry at you, but that’s alright.”

Trump moved on, and the crowd got louder and more animated. An hour into his speech, he later brought up allegations of voter fraud. “Hundreds of thousands of votes are missing,” he claimed, and the crowd cheered. “I just want Mike Lee to listen to this when I’m talking, because you know what? We need his vote.”

Lee stood there, with 20,000 hysterical rallygoers at his back, all viewing him as something between complacent and traitorous. “It was a creepy, weird feeling for him,” a person close to the situation said. “He could almost feel the daggers of all these people staring at him.”

It would be another 48 hours before Lee would see how sharp, and how dangerous, a riled-up crowd of Trump supporters could become. But for that night, he experienced a markedly different atmosphere than he’d seen before — just two months previous, at an Arizona rally, thousands of screaming adorers egged him on as he paraphrased Book of Mormon phrases and compared Trump to Captain Moroni.

That January night, though, the adulation wore off. Trump’s legal team had failed to assemble a convincing case to overturn the election, and Lee knew time was quickly running out. It was time to accept reality.

And that made Trump more than a little angry.

IN THE BUILDUP to the 2016 election, Sen. Lee was slow to trust Trump. As more and more of his Republican colleagues endorsed the nominee, Lee remained skeptical. After the Access Hollywood tape was released, Lee had heard enough.

“Mr. Trump, I respectfully ask you, with all due respect, to step aside,” Lee said in a Facebook Live video a month before Election Day. “Step down. Allow someone else to carry the banner of these principles.”

Lee was unconvinced that Trump could legitimately challenge Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. “Clearly, I was wrong,” Lee later wrote in the Deseret News — and within the first years of the Trump administration, Lee flip-flopped and became one of the president’s staunchest allies in the Senate. 

“It … has been taught that actions speak louder than words. And when we look at what President Trump has actually done … his record is strong,” Lee wrote last October in an op-ed titled “I didn’t vote for Trump 4 years ago, but I will this election.”

When impeachment trials were underway a year ago, Lee fought for the president’s acquittal. In the buildup to the 2020 election, Lee attended rallies and sung Trump’s praises. But when chatter emerged about potential challenges in Congress to the election’s results, Lee drew a line.

When I asked Sen. Lee if he ever considered joining his Senate colleagues in challenging the election, he laughed.

“No,” he said, chuckling. We sat in his Washington office in early February, and he leaned back in his chair, resting a foot on the table between us. “Who does that?”

He stopped laughing, and looked at me with a straight face. “Fortunately, mercifully, in the nearly two-and-a-half centuries that we’ve been a country, that hasn’t been a thing.”

IN A JULY INTERVIEW on Fox News with Chris Wallace, Trump refused to say whether he’d accept the results of the election. “I have to see,” he said. “No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no.’ And I didn’t last time, either.”

Throughout the rest of the summer and into the fall, Trump floated the idea of delaying the election, along with casting doubt on the validity of mail-in ballots and the probability of a peaceful transition of power. In September, Lee purported to share some of Trump’s concern with a vote-by-mail election: “An entire country is moving toward mail-in balloting all at once. There is legitimate reason for concern. We ought not dismiss that cavalierly,” he said on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

Lee later clarified to me that his concern wasn’t with the merits of vote-by-mail, but with the sheer volume of municipalities voting by mail for the first time. “There are special concerns that are presented by the massive, widespread and somewhat unprecedented use of mail-in balloting that we had this year,” he said. “But to say at the outset that it’s going to be unfair, and that if (Trump) loses it will be because it was stolen, it’s not okay. And I made that clear at the time.”

As the election drew closer, news outlets warned that outcomes in some states would take days, even weeks, to be finalized. As tallies trickled in from Georgia, Nevada and other swing states, the president and his team became nervous.

A source close to Sen. Lee disclosed a phone call between Trump and Lee a few days after Election Day. Sen. Lee encouraged Trump to explore the legal avenues afforded him to ensure a fair election — “I’d encourage you to pursue whatever remedies you’ve got under the law for recounts, audits, or related litigation,” the source recounted Sen. Lee saying — but warned that only a finite amount of time was available. 

A former litigator himself, Sen. Lee knew as well as anyone that litigation can take months or years, from filing a complaint to a discovery to judgments and appeals. Trump’s legal team had a matter of weeks — only until Dec. 14, when electors met at each state capitol to cast votes. 

Regardless of the outcome, though, Sen. Lee encouraged Trump to be transparent. In the case of his legal avenues coming up empty-handed, he needed to accept the results of the election. If he lost, Sen. Lee told Trump, he needed to promise the country that he would leave the White House. 

WHILE TRUMP’S LEGAL TEAM filed lawsuits in state and federal courts from Arizona to Pennsylvania, Lee kept his finger on their pulse. He started meeting with lawyers — both those who represented the president, and others who were following the court proceedings independently — to see what progress was being made. “I was genuinely curious about where it would go,” he said.

From a distance, some claims seemed interesting, even promising, to Lee, but upon inspecting more closely, there was little substance. A little over two weeks after the election, attorneys Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani held a press conference at the RNC headquarters. Lee was familiar with Powell as a lawyer, and respected her — “she’s done a lot of good work on behalf of a lot of good clients,” he said — but this press conference was disheartening. She peddled unfounded conspiracy theories about the election, claiming foreign interference orchestrated by deceased Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and manipulated by “communist money” from China and Cuba.

“She kind of lost me,” Lee said. “ I couldn’t ever get an answer from anyone about how they actually prove that (those claims) had happened. And the claims themselves sounded fanciful.”

That didn’t stop Lee from digging. He began to explore other arguments from the Trump team (“more out of curiosity, than anything,” he claimed), but none seemed to carry weight for a prolonged period of time. His logic was this: If any of the arguments are true and could be proven, something would come to fruition in the courts.

Lee drew a line, though, at pointing to failed lawsuits as a tell-all sign of no election interference whatsoever. The former litigator knew that a number of things could render a case moot — “all of this stuff is determined by this somewhat byzantine labyrinth of state election laws in each and every state,” he said. But as cases kept getting dismissed, he was dismayed.

His trust, then, was in the American judicial system, not Trump’s legal team. One was proven; the other was not. If something went awry during the election, though, the courts would bring it to light eventually.

IN DECEMBER, SEN. LEE first heard some of his colleagues in Congress throw around the date Jan. 6. “Well, we’re just not going to count their votes,” some said. That made Lee pause.

As Sen. Lee recounted this to me, he pulled out his pocket Constitution — published by the controversial National Center for Constitutional Studies — and thumbed through it. “There are a couple of important things to remember about the Constitution on this front,” he said.

First, he explained, Article 1, Sections 4 and 5 give Congress the power to alter or make laws as to “the times, places and manner” of elections for Senators and Representatives, and to be the ultimate arbiters in the case of a dispute.

In presidential elections, though, the Constitution awards no such authority to Congress. “The framers of the Constitution made a decided, deliberate choice — the choosing of the president of the United States would be up to the states,” Lee said. “It would be a state function.” States choose the president by way of electors, chosen by the state legislatures.

Lee referenced the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court decision in 2000: “ … the State legislature’s power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the manner used by State legislatures in several States for many years after the Framing of our Constitution.” Presidential elections in each state to select electors are tradition, and not constitutionally necessary.

By mid December, Lee was more vocal amongst his colleagues about this constitutional mechanism. When electors assembled on Dec. 14 to cast their votes, Lee issued a statement — “a statement that I knew would make some people unhappy, and it did” — recognizing the event that had transpired that day. 

As Lee studied the Constitution, he found that the only possible way for the election to be overturned in Trump’s favor, at that point, was if a state had submitted a “dueling slate of electors” — multiple groups of electors that voted for different candidates. There was no evidence of that.

“Absent new information that could give rise to a judicial or legislative determination altering the impact of today’s electoral-college votes,” the statement read, in part, “Joe Biden will become president of the United States on January 20, 2021.” 

EVEN AFTER THE ELECTORS convened on Dec. 14, Trump’s legal team continued to argue. Lee was confused.

He stayed in contact with Trump’s lawyers, and he called on occasion to get updates. Lee would ask what their argument was now, and they would rattle off claims of election fraud.

“I would say, ‘No, no, no. At this point, I’m not even asking about what your underlying theory is, as to why you think Trump won,’” Lee recalled. “‘What I’m saying is that the only votes that matter at this point are those cast by the electors. What am I missing?’”

The legal team didn’t have an answer, but they didn’t stop, either. By late December, Lee was frustrated. He kept hearing chatter of conclusory arguments but didn’t see anything of real substance. They kept telling him that something big was coming, but Lee was doubtful they had any hope (“I was quite convinced that the odds were more likely of seeing Elvis live and in the flesh right now,” he said). He kept asking to see a memo, a legal document, or anything that provided evidence for their case.

Finally, on Jan. 2, one of the lawyers sent him a short memo articulating their theory. The first line said: “Seven states have submitted dueling states of electors.” Lee knew that was false, and he regarded the memo as ludicrous. “I don’t know whether some fifth-grader hacked into their account and created a dummy document and they sent this to me by accident, but this is a lost cause,” he recalled. 

“It was just ridiculous.”

THE SAME WEEKEND Lee received the memo, he began preparing a statement indicating that he intended to fulfill his role of opening and counting the electoral votes that coming Wednesday. On Jan. 3, he and his wife flew to Georgia to campaign for Sens. Loeffler and Perdue.

While he was there, a friend asked if he’d be willing to meet with some of Trump’s lawyers stationed in Georgia. Lee agreed, both out of curiosity and of a sense of duty to his friend. The first thing he asked about was the memo he’d received days earlier. “They appeared not to have seen this memo,” he said, probably because they were focused on the president’s case in Georgia.

Lee spent a few hours listening to their arguments — about Georgia mail-in ballots being handled differently and going to false addresses — and was interested. But after a while, he interjected. “This is interesting stuff,” he said, “But I’m not sure why you’re sharing it with me, other than the fact that I find it interesting.”

“We want you to do something about it,” the lawyers said.

“You mean, with Jan. 6? With the vote count?” Lee retorted. “I have no more power to adjudicate the outcome of the Georgia presidential election than the Queen of England has to do that. Zero.”

The lawyers were disappointed. Even if they were right, Lee reasoned, they only had 48 hours, and there was no way to litigate on that time crunch. Even if they had time, certified Georgia electors already cast their votes.

The lawyers responded that a court, or even the Georgia legislature, could still change the electoral vote count, name a new slate of electors, or rescind the slate they’d named previously.

“If that happens, that happens,” Lee said. “But it seems like it’s a Hail Mary built on a Hail Mary, built on a pipe dream, built on another Hail Mary.”

AFTER HIS CONVERSATION with the Trump legal team in Georgia, Lee kept hearing about states resending or replacing their electors. When he heard it from the Trump legal team first, it seemed extremely unrealistic. But he kept hearing whispers that nationwide — in Georgia, in Pennsylvania, in Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona — there were plans to send a new slate of electoral votes.

If that was true, Lee needed to know, because that could change things completely. No one would give him a straight answer, though. Everyone seemed to talk about it like a proven fact, but there was no evidence.

Lee stopped reaching out to the legal team and started cold-calling whoever he could think of in those states.  “It was a very unsympathetic, unscientific process,” he said. “I called people I knew in one state and said, ‘Who can you connect me with?’”

He spoke with state legislators or anyone else who could give him an answer as to what was going on. He found no credible evidence, and he started talking to his Senate colleagues, with one simple argument, pulled directly from the 12th Amendment: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” The role of Lee and his Senate comrades was to open and count the electors’ votes. It was that simple. “Those last seven words — ‘And the votes shall then be counted’ — contain the entirety of our authority,” Lee said. “That’s it.”

By the end of the day on Jan. 5, he had no doubt that the rumors were false. The election was over, and all that was left was to count the votes.

IN HIS OFFICE on the morning of Jan. 6., Sen. Lee prepared his comments for the Senate floor. He would be allotted five minutes, and he wanted to be sure that he expressed his feelings — and what he thought to be his authority, by virtue of the Constitution — clearly and concisely. 

Because he was writing, he paid little attention to what was going on outside, nor did he watch the news. By the time he left his office to walk to the Capitol (Congress was to convene at 1 p.m.), his wife and a handful of staffers told him about Trump’s speech. They had seen it on TV. It was fiery, they said, and there was a big crowd.

“I didn’t think much of it,” he said. “It’s D.C. Protests happen.”

Shortly after the Senate began its debates, the Secret Service entered and pulled Vice President Mike Pence from the room. A few minutes later, they returned for Chuck Grassley, the president pro tempore. A non-uniformed Capitol Police Officer entered the room next and stood at the presiding officer’s podium. “I’m going to ask all of you to remain in your seats,” he said. “The Capitol security perimeter has been breached.”

Lee and a handful of his colleagues gathered together and offered a prayer. Shortly after, Lee got a call from the White House. It was President Trump, who was calling for Sen. Tommy Tuberville. As the Deseret News’ Dennis Romboy reported, “Lee said when he later asked Tuberville about the conversation, he got the impression that Trump didn’t know about the chaos going on in the Senate chamber.”

Lee and his Senate colleagues were escorted to a room elsewhere in the Capitol complex, where they stayed in lockdown for the rest of the day. Around 5 p.m., while Lee was on a TV interview, he missed a call from Rudy Giuliani, who also thought he was Tommy Tuberville. (“Somebody at the White House must have printed off a list, transposing our numbers,” Lee said.)

“I’m calling you because I want to discuss with you how they’re trying to rush this hearing, and how we need you, our Republican friends, to try to just slow it down so we can get these legislatures to get more information to you,” Giuliani said.

Upon returning to the Senate chamber, Lee couldn’t believe what he heard. Especially after all that transpired throughout the day, for Giuliani to still hold on to such claims was ridiculous. “I didn’t pass the message along (to Sen. Tuberville),” Lee said. “It was patently absurd.”

IN THE JAN. 4 GEORGIA RALLY, Sen. Lee saw an impassioned group, cheering on lies. Two days later, he saw an impassioned group, marching to the order of a lie.

Over a month has passed since the insurrection on Jan. 6. The events of that day won’t be forgotten any time soon. The vivid, harrowing detail presented in this week’s impeachment trial makes sure of that. 

Lee spoke of Jan. 6 in great detail, but with great care, as if it was still a fresh, open wound in his memory. He spoke of the confusion he felt and the chaos that surrounded him. He hinted that his Senate colleagues — even those who planned to object to the electors’ votes — were shell-shocked, even sorry, at what the election challenge had resulted in.

As we began to wrap up, I asked Sen. Lee a final question. “How did this affect your relationship with former president Trump?”

He took a deep breath. “I have not spoken to him since.”

He looked at the ground, and there was a silence. Fifteen seconds passed slowly. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet. “That’s probably a conversation that will have to wait for another day.”

I straightened up, getting ready to leave, and the Senator stopped me. “Look. It’s a very, very bad thing that happened, and one of many examples of what can occur when people feel passionately about their cause but don’t bother to look at, or care about, what the text of the Constitution says.”  

He returned his pocket Constitution to his suitcoat, and I thanked him for his time. We went separate ways — me, with a paper and pen, and him, with his Constitution.