Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, again, everyone. With us now Politico's White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire who's also the host of the aptly named MSNBC show, Way Too Early, weekdays at 5 AM Eastern. He's a regular presence on Morning Joe on MSNBC, as some of you know. Now Jonathan Lemire has a book called, The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism and the State of American Politics After 2020. The book has already made news for some of its content, including a quote attributed to Steve Bannon saying Trump would lie about anything, a take that Trump got away with a 2020 big lie to the extent that he has because he was never held accountable for his election fraud lies from the 2016 campaign.

I'm especially interested in Jonathan's last chapter that describes party leaders having gone from condemning the Capitol attack to downplaying it, to coming to terms with it, and how we're seeing GOP candidates around the country running on changing the laws for how votes are counted and elections are certified. Really threatening as far as I'm concerned. Jonathan, always an honor that after you are up way too early, that you stay up late with us. Maybe our 11 AM is your 11 PM, so thanks and welcome back to WNYC.

Jonathan Lemire: It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's always great.

Brian Lehrer: You write that the big lie started not in 2020, but in 2016. Take us there.

Jonathan Lemire: That is correct. I was there for an otherwise uneventful rally on a sleepy Monday, August 1st, 2016 at a convention center in Columbus, Ohio. I was with the Associated Press at the time covering then-candidate Trump. About halfway through his remarks, which were not exactly electrifying, he suggested for the first time that the general election being conducted that fall would not be conducted fairly, that it would be rigged.

We immediately had never been there before as a nation. Some of your listeners will surely remember earlier that year, he had made claims about the Iowa [inaudible 00:02:22] and the Republican National Committee would have perhaps conspired against him, but that was sour grapes for a loss. That was intra-party squabbling. This was very different. This was the fundamental tenant of American democracy, the vote, and he was saying it wouldn't be counted fairly. I immediately had a new lead for my story that morning and we saw it build during that campaign. If you recall in the first general election debate against Hillary Clinton, he repeated that false assertion and said that he would not necessarily honor the result.

I also uncover for the book, an interview with Roger Stone around that same time, in which he predicted that what Trump should do. He advised Trump what Trump should do, would be that on election night, if he were to lose, to claim that he won anyway. He used Florida as an example to say, "Look, the polls have Trump up in Florida now, therefore, if he ends up losing it, then the election was stolen." He even predicted there could be violence.

Now, as it turned out, they were four years early. Trump, of course, won that election. He did commission a voter fraud commission to look into the idea that because of illegal balloting just so happened because he lost the popular vote. He was trying to justify that, but largely that came and went with just a few headlines. What the book shows and traces over his four years of presidency is that he's slowly, slowly, slowly built towards the big lie of 2020.

Brian Lehrer: You remind us of, I guess, what is a footnote to history that after Trump was elected in 2016, but lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by about 3 million votes, he did impanel this election fraud investigative team to try to prove that he actually won the popular vote too and they never really found anything. They got disbanded without even a real report if I remember correctly. Could you remind us a little more about what that group actually found or didn't?

Jonathan Lemire: They found very little. Kris Kobach, who was the Kansas official, was put in charge of it. It was nominally placed under the Vice President's office, but he didn't do it. Pence didn't have anything to do with it. Kobach, who's known for his hardline immigration stances and later failed run for Senate, led the committee and they particularly were looking at places like New Hampshire where they thought that clearly Democratic voters were being bussed over the line from Massachusetts or California where illegal immigrants were voting.

Yes, to your point, Trump suggested there were just as many illegal votes out there as his deficit in the popular vote to Hillary Clinton. It indeed came and went. There was even some pushback from Republican state officials. A report was written and only released because of a lawsuit that Forrester produced a short time later. They came and went, and most Americans shrugged it off, but Trump never did let it go. He still years later believed that he had the popular vote victory stolen from him. Now, of course, this was in many ways him just refusing to accept that he lost that to Hillary Clinton.

Brian Lehrer: You say he believed. We don't know if he believed it, right? We don't know to this day if he believes the big lie about 2020.

Jonathan Lemire: People close to the president who I spoke to for this book and obviously my day-to-day reporting, say that at this point, he does, that he had convinced himself of that truth. Now, I detail in the book, in the days after the 2020 election, he was telling people that he couldn't believe he lost to Joe Biden. There was suddenly an acceptance there. An anger, but a realization that he had been defeated. As he surrounded himself by the Sidney Powells and Rudy Giulianis and Michael Flynns of the world, who fed in these conspiracy theories, he eventually convinced himself of that truth.

Now, can we ever know truly what is in the mind or heart of another person? No, but certainly those close to Donald Trump say at this point, he does believe it, and publicly and privately since the days after the election has only said one thing, is that he believed the election was stolen.

Brian Lehrer: How can he believe it without any evidence having come forward that there were enough fraudulent votes in all these swing states to flip the election?

Jonathan Lemire: He will say there's evidence. Of course, you and I know better and that's part of the lie. He will point to the conspiracy theories about voting machines or international cabals or some far-flung global network to try to defeat him, that he will say the mail, mail-in particulars, those mail-in ballots that became so popular in the pandemic, were central to this fraud perpetrated against him.

He is not going to be dissuaded by what we perceive as evidence. That is going to be a challenge to us all, as Donald Trump now seemingly prepares to run for president again and still saying over and over, he's done so this week, that he won the 2020 election. It's going to require an extraordinary amount of fact-checking and diligence by those of us covering him, the media to make sure that we present the facts to the public even though he is intent on doing exactly the opposite.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, your calls are welcome for Jonathan Lemire, Politico's White House bureau chief, host of Way Too Early, weekdays at 5:00 AM Eastern on MSNBC, prominent presence on Morning Joe on MSNBC, and now the author of The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism and The State of American Politics After 2020. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

To circle back to one of the premises from the early part of your book that Trump got away with the 2020 big lie to the extent that he has because he was never held accountable for his election fraud lies from the 2016 campaign. How could he have been held accountable for that, but wasn't?

Jonathan Lemire: There could have been a moment at any time during his presidency where the Republican Party drew a line and they did not. We have certainly had presidents of our past who at times squabble with members of their own party. We're seeing it right now where President Joe Biden, of course, cannot get Senator Manchin, and Senator Sinema along with every piece of his agenda. There was no need. The Republicans could have been supportive of Trump's legislative agenda without indulging the lies.

What the book traces in detail is how Donald Trump hijacked both the Republican Party, but also the conservative media to go along with and amplify his lies, big and small. Some of them are nonsensical about, say, the size of the crowd at his inauguration or the fact that he made a mistake while tweeting about the path of a hurricane saying it was going to hit Alabama when it actually wasn't.

In both of those cases, what's actually dangerous and what foreshadowed what were to come is that he used the powers of government, the levers of government to justify his lies. A National Park Service employee doctored photographs to make his crowd look bigger on the mall during his inauguration and as for the hurricane, the NOAA, the peer of meteorologists, basically, put out a report that suggested that their prior forecast had been mistakenly published and that actually Trump was right and that the storm had threatened Alabama.

Both these relatively small incidents, but show how he was unafraid to use every means as a tool at his disposal for his own political power, whether it is to avoid embarrassment or to win an election.

Brian Lehrer: You could do a whole Trump propaganda trivia quiz based on these things in the book that a lot of our listeners probably heard at the time and have completely forgotten about, like that tweet about the path of the hurricane and you mentioned Inauguration Day. I always thought that that was really the signal of what his presidency was going to be about from a truth-in-lie standpoint.

Right on Inauguration Day when he sent out his press secretary to insist the contrary to reporting with people's own eyes, his inauguration crowd was bigger than President Obama's. Did you sense that this was going to be that up is down down is up propaganda machine from Inauguration Day 2017?

Jonathan Lemire: I was in the briefing room that day when Sean Spicer and his ill-fitting suit came out to insist that Trump's crowd was bigger than Obama's on a day where he was not supposed to brief the press. Trump made him go out there because he was so angry at the media coverage of not just the size of the crowd's inauguration, but the size of the Women's March that was happening in DC and elsewhere on January 21st, after the inauguration.

Yes, I had covered the Trump campaign in 2016, and certainly knew that he was not bound to the usual tenets of truth like the rest of us. Even so, it took on a different meaning and weight when it was done from the White House. When it was done from the White House podium, when it was done from behind the resolute desk in the Oval Office, that suddenly he was no longer just a candidate in 2016, even spotty election fraud as dangerous as that is for a party's nominee to be doing so, it's far more so when the President of the United States who has the power of the federal government behind him, would be embracing such lies, whether trivial ones, like crowd size or huge ones about voter fraud.

Brian Lehrer: Phillip in Yonkers, you're on WNYC with Jonathan Lemire. Hi, Phillip.

Phillip: Hi, good morning. You guys were just talking about whether Trump actually believes the big lie and that maybe he's convinced himself, which I think is what you said. I think you said maybe you've heard from people that he's convinced himself. I think that's extremely ridiculous and irresponsible for any kind of journalist to say, it's insane. We all know he's a liar. I think The New York Times registered that he's lied 13,000 times or something. To even indulge in the idea that he may be telling the truth or that he may be believing that. Why can't you just be a man and say, "Obviously, he's lying? He doesn't believe it." It's insane to say that he-- No, it's not even funny. It's insane-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: What's funny is that you're impugning Jonathan's manhood because he's quoting his sources in the context of a book that is all about Donald Trump as a liar. Jonathan, you get why it's hard for people to believe. I think one of the points of the January 6th committee hearings so far has been to establish that so many people who Trump trusted in his inner circle, William Bars, the most obvious example, but there are so many told him that the election was not stolen and yet he maybe believes it like your sources tell you. I think a lot of the point of this particular stream of testimony at the hearings has been to establish that Trump knows this is a lie and he was trying to get himself to remain in power anyway.

Jonathan Lemire: Right, the entire book, as you just say, details Donald Trump's history of lying from private citizen to candidate to President and now potentially candidate again. A number, not everyone, a lot of prominent people in his orbit. You mentioned the attorney general, we now know that his own daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump agreed with William Bars' assessment that there was no voter fraud. Trump heard this every single day and whether he believes it or not, is almost immaterial.

As you point out, I'm simply reporting what people have told me and countless other reporters throughout the beat, but whether he in his heart knew he had lost or not, he acted as if he did believe the lies and that is far more dangerous. No one's giving him the benefit of the doubt whatsoever. In my day-by-day coverage as well as the book plainly calls out what he's doing as the most dangerous threat to American democracy since the Civil War.

The January 6th committee has done a very effective job laying that out and doing so I might add, we through the voices of Republicans, through the voices of Trump administration officials, through the voices sometimes of his closest aides. These aren't Democrats, these are never Trumpers making the case, that's not who's testifying. This is the inner circle, for the most part, true believers who were there with him until the end, except January 6th was the one line they wouldn't cross.

Brian Lehrer: We'll continue in a minute with Jonathan Lemire, stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC with Politico's White House bureau chief Jonathan Lemire, who's the author of a new book called The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020. Jonathan also hosts the MSNBC show, Way Too Early weekdays at 5:00 AM. Actually, Jonathan, I was thinking that since that's a national show, on the west coast, it's 2:00 AM, you could call the show Way Too Late.

Jonathan Lemire: Yes, I also will note that a couple of weeks ago, I traveled with President Biden to Europe to prepare summits when it aired at 11:00 AM local, so for at least that week, it was appropriately time [unintelligible 00:16:21]

Brian Lehrer: I actually know a journalist who had to put out a piece of work every day by 6:00 AM, Eastern Time. I guess he had some flexibility in his life and he actually moved to Europe so that he could be living regular hours and not get up in the middle of the night to do it. That's one way to tweak that schedule but 2:00 AM--

Jonathan Lemire: What you're saying is, MSNBC needs a Madrid, Europe.

Brian Lehrer: I think they need one very badly, very badly. Tammy in Boston, you're on WNYC with Jonathan Lemire. Hi, Tammy.

Tammy: Hi. Good morning. I would like to express my dismay that sounds a little bit like Jonathan took a sip of the Kool-Aid. When he says that this is what his sources-- His sources are puppets, they're mouthpieces for him. Trump unlike Jim Jones, he would never drink his own Kool-Aid but I refer to him now as America's Taliban. He is a vicious, vile-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: America's what? Taliban?

Tammy: Yes. I'm going to make a bumper sticker and get some hats out there and t-shirts, but that's exactly what he is he's America's Taliban. He is worse than Jim Jones, at least Jim Jones did us a favor and drank his own Kool-Aid. Trump, in Billy Bush's tape on that foster and I think in many, many other speeches, Donald Trump said repeatedly, I think he was bragging to Billy Bush on that tape, that if you tell the same lie over and over and over again, thousands of times, they'll believe him, they'll believe anything. That's how he operates.

Brian Lehrer: Tammy, thank you very much. Address Tammy and also maybe in this context bring up that Steve Bannon quote from the book that's broken out a little bit, saying that Trump would lie about anything.

Jonathan Lemire: Yes, Steve Bannon would tell people at the White House, and let's remember who people-- Probably don't need a refresher who Bannon is but he's a former head of Breitbart News, real right-wing provocateur, just was convicted last week for contempt of Congress because he wouldn't comply with a subpoena during the January 6th investigation. He took over the stretch run of the Trump campaign in 2016 and had a relatively brief tenure in the White House.

He would tell aides that he couldn't believe just that the sheer ferocity and frequency of Trump's lies that he would lie about literally anything, that he would lie not to win a new cycle as the saying goes, but a news hour or a news minute or a news moment, just to try to change a cable Chiron or just get a brief upper hand and then exchange with a reporter. Trump is a pathological liar. That's according to the people close to him. The people close to him know that Trump lies about everything or many things.

Certainly, he voices the opinion that he believes the election was stolen, as we covered a little earlier. What's in his heart is impossible for any man to see. We know it's a lie, but he's acting on it anyway and that is what's so dangerous, whether he believes it or not.

Brian Lehrer: What do you make of Bannon's contempt of Congress conviction the other day? He didn't seem to put up much of a legal fight.

Jonathan Lemire: No, in fact, he was called out very much so for not doing so. Bannon is someone who has always embraced the idea of being a MAGA/ MATA in his words. That he is trying to-- First of all, he was pardoned by then President Trump for a scam that included defrauding Trump's supporters of money trying to build a border wall with Mexico. He's fallen in and out of Trump's good graces. He's now back in and this is a demonstration of loyalty.

He believes the demonstration of trying to show that the legal system is rigged against Trump and his allies by not cooperating with the January 6th committee and then taking the guilty verdict without putting up much of a fight remains unknown whether he'll serve much of the way of prison time but certainly this is his way. By still been at the very forefront of the Trump movement, establishing his bonafides if you will. There is certainly an expectation that if Trump were to run again, Bannon would be even if not an official member of the campaign, but a leading voice.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. I was thinking that since the law as I understand it requires at least a 30-day sentence for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify under subpoena before the January 6th committee that maybe Steve Bannon has reached the point where as you say, as a MAGA/ MATA, he's actually willing to go to jail for a month or more in order to pull this political stunt which starts a whole other thread in that world of we are now political prisoners.

Jonathan Lemire: I think that is a very reasonable assessment. People in that world have floated similar scenarios about whether Bannon wouldn't mind even being locked up for a while because of the symbolism it would provide.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer in East Harlem, you're on WNYC with Jonathan Lemire. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Yes. Good morning, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I understand much more of the psychological underpinnings and we all have been aghast for years over the pathological lying and misinformation that Trump has propagated. What I don't understand is why he has not formally faced fraud charges. For example, with someone like Bernie Madoff who destroyed lives financially through his scheming and lying, he faced over 100 years in prison. Trump is destroying our country and is hurting countless lives in the process. Why is he not formally facing fraud charges for this level of lying and misinformation?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Jennifer. That's such an interesting question. Of course Jonathan, I know a standard answer is you can't prosecute politicians for lying to the public. Otherwise, they'd all be in jail. She's laying out the scenario under which it's beyond just a lie. It's a fraud because of the extent of it and the consequences of it and maybe there's some kind of fraud statute that would apply. Have you heard that theory before? Have you heard any lawyers discuss that possibility?

Jonathan Lemire: Preliminarily, yes. I think there are a lot of legal fronts though open against the former president and they go far beyond what we're seeing in the January 6th committee. Even there, there seems to be some momentum in the department of justice. We heard from Attorney General Merrick Garland last week he as we know has been receiving a lot of criticism for Democrats frustrated at the slow pace they think of his investigation. He's also giving an interview tonight on NBC, I should note.

There seems to be potentially a roadmap being laid out by the committee for possible criminal charges against Trump, including for incitement. Then we also know that even though the criminal case in New York seems to have stalled, the one in Fulton County Georgia very much has not. That's a very active case there where both Trump and some of his closest allies may be in some legal jeopardy.

That is also part of the thinking people close to Trump tell me as to why the former president is considering declaring his candidacy for 2024 sooner than later. Traditionally it would be after the midterms. Nearly all Republicans, even those who support Donald Trump running for office again want him to wait till after the midterms. They don't want him to be a distraction in a moment where the GOP feels like they'll do well in November.

Trump is eying a much earlier return to the stage. He's giving a prominent speech today, in fact, in Washington for two reasons. One, he is anxious. People tell me about the publicity the January 6th committee has received. He wants to change that narrative. He also wants to send a warning signal to other Republicans who might be considered challenging him namely Governor Ron DeSantis. If he jumps in first he believes others won't. Then lastly, if he is a declared candidate, there's at least a thought that might make prosecutors a little more reluctant to go after him. He wouldn't just be a former president. He would be favored for the GOP nomination in 2024.

Brian Lehrer: I keep hearing that theory, but is there anything legal behind it, or is it just political and public relations oriented? Is there any legal reason that it's harder to prosecute a declared presidential candidate than it is if he's not one yet?

Jonathan Lemire: No, not a legal reason. There's a department of justice guidelines about avoiding investigations so close to an election which, of course, or at least commenting about them, which of course will anger so many Democrats because James Comey, the FBI director did just that two weeks before the 2016 election when he announced that he was taking a look at Hillary Clinton's emails. Certainly, there is a chute or guideline, I should say, in the department of justice to not charge a sitting president so that as we all encountered during the Mueller investigation. That's a real thing. In terms of a candidate though, no, it's more of a tradition. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's one that any prosecutor would have to follow.

Brian Lehrer: Also on the legal track, there is news today. You've probably seen this that two of Mike Pence's top advisors have testified not just before the January 6th committee, but before a grand jury investigating January 6th which means it's a criminal investigation of some kind. I want to play a clip. This will remind some people who may have seen Greg Jacob's very dramatic testimony before the January 6th committee but then forgot about him because he's not much of a public figure. Otherwise, he was the chief counsel to vice president Pence on and around January 6th.

In this clip from his live testimony before the committee, he's describing warning Trump lawyer John Eastman, who's trying to get Pence to somehow say that he can reject the electoral votes to do so. Eastman seems to suggest here that they break the law, with knowledge of breaking the law. This is a little bit of how Greg Jacob described that.

Greg Jacob: Then he implored me now that we have established that the electoral count act isn't so sacrosanct as you have made it out to be, I implore you one last time can the vice president please do what we've been asking him to do these last two days, suspend the joint session, send it back to the states.

Brian Lehrer: Jonathan, one way to hear that clip is that John Eastman was saying, "I know this is the law but because other people have played fast and loose with the law in some other respects in his estimation, let's just ignore this law and do something illegal anyway and deny the electoral votes." Do you think that that might be the basis of the grand jury's investigation that had Greg Jacob testifying or do you have any other information about that?

Jonathan Lemire: The grand jury is of course working in secret but that certainly is a possibility. We know there has been an active probe in the district of Columbia. It just so happened that Marc Short was captured leaving the courtroom on Friday because there was a failing, a TV camera set up front for Steven Bannon. That's sort of how news of this came out.

Brian Lehrer: That's funny. Marc Short, Pence's chief of staff at that time. Yes.

Jonathan Lemire: Correct. They saw him leave and went, "Wait what's this about?" Then figured it out from there. It should be understood, it's not just Jacob, but Marc Short, of course, he was as you said the chief of staff. He was also with vice president Pence on January 6th. He was one of the few aides that was with him for most of the day at the Capitol. Certainly could provide testimony there as well as being an important advisor who was privy to some of the White House meetings about this idea of not honoring the electoral count vote. There was this pressure campaign to have Pence to go along with that. Pence, of course on January 6th, refused to do so.

Brian Lehrer: To finish up, I mentioned in the intro the final chapter of your book which looks forward and my concern that we may be heading to this time when votes are counted honestly in some states and not counted honestly in other states because people are running for governor in some places, people are running for other state offices in some places on changing the election laws not for how people are allowed to vote, but how the votes are counted and how elections are certified. I'm curious how much you see that as a threat as we head toward 2024.

Jonathan Lemire: It's a significant threat. What the book does it's not just a Trump book and certainly doesn't end with January 6th. In fact, the back half of the book is everything that's happened since then. Republicans are using the big lie as a cover to tighten access to the ballot in nearly two dozen states across the country, but also doing what you're saying putting up Trump-friendly candidates, big lie friendly candidates who for governor, for state secretaries of state who will have a significant role in investigations into the vote, into the certification of the vote. Where a lot of Democrats and good government groups are deeply nervous about what this means for 2022 and especially 2024 if a lot of those candidates win this year.

This is partially why the Electoral Count Act is there's hopefully progress being made there on Capitol Hill to change that process around January 6th. There's also why there's frustration among Democrats that the Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress were not able to get federal voting law protections passed earlier this year. That's also captured in the book. It makes clear the Republicans have embraced the big lie.

Legitimate political discourse are three words. The national party used to describe what happened on January 6th, not insurrection, not a riot, not violence, legitimate political discourse. It shows the shadow of Trump's lie did not just fuel the violence, but it's going to [inaudible 00:31:20] this year, and in 2024.

Brian Lehrer: All right, your phone is breaking up just at the right moment because we are out of time. To talk about the content of the book, The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020 with Jonathan Lemire, the author, and Politico's White House bureau chief and host of the MSNBC show Way Too Early, wake up way too early at 5:00 AM Eastern if you want to see it on MSNBC or stay up way too late if you're one of our California listeners and see it at 2:00 AM Pacific time. Jonathan, we always appreciate it. Thanks a lot. Congratulations on the book.

Jonathan Lemire: Thank you so much.

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