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 didn’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…
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