EP. 37 — CONVERSATIONS: MARK BOWDEN & MATTHEW TEAGUE

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Weston Wamp: I'm Weston Wamp, and this is “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One. 

Mark Bowden: The idea was to create a cloud of suspicion so that even reasonable people might start to ask themselves, well, maybe something was wrong here, just because so many people are complaining about the election.

Matthew Teague: There is a pinch point. And if Donald Trump has a particular gift, it's for finding places where there's a gap between what is strictly legal and what's just sort of accepted now, and that pinch point is the certification of votes. People don't have a very clear idea of how votes are certified, what's ceremonial, what's official in state legislatures in US Congress.

Mark Bowden: The deeper problem is that, and I describe this in the book as, the modicum of trust that's absolutely necessary in order for democracy to survive. And that is you have to be willing to trust that the people that you disagree with are also Americans, they’re American citizens. They believe in the system and they will run an honest election the next time out, win or lose.

Matthew Teague: How close did Donald Trump come to overthrowing the election? Again, I don't think there really would've been any question as to whether he lost. He did. But how close did we come to a complete upheaval of the political system? I think very close. I think if Mike Pence had acted the way that Trump wanted him to on January 6th, I think we could have descended into something really, truly ugly.

Weston Wamp: For the first time in history, an American president alleged an election had been stolen. And to this day, many Republicans believe that to be the case. The coordinated, Presidentially endorsed efforts to “stop the steal” were both haphazard and serious. It was election disinformation on steroids. More than 60 courts, multiple audits, the Department of Homeland Security, and former President Trump’s attorney general all agree — there was no evidence of significant fraud in the 2020 election.

As the dust began to settle, two formidable American journalists set out to ensure a full record was written. Mark Bowden, writer of  “Black Hawk Down,” teamed up with veteran journalist Matthew Teague for, “The Steal” — a new book that offers a week-by-week, state-by-state account of the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election. I spoke with the authors about their book, how to prevent what happened in 2020 from ever happening again, and who the heroes and heroines were that helped stop the efforts to overturn the will of the people.

This is Episode 37: A conversation with authors Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague 

Weston Wamp: I began my conversation with Mark and Matt by asking them about the inspiration for the project.

Mark Bowden: Well, for me, it came because of my publisher. I have a long time relationship with my publisher and editor, Morgan Entrekin, who owns Grove Atlantic. And he called me, I guess, in April of last year. And he was concerned that Congress was not going to fully investigate what had happened. And he thought that he wanted somebody to do it and wanted to know if I could suggest anybody. And I said, “well, you know what, I would be interested in doing it.” But given the timeframe because he had said he wanted to do it quickly, I told him that he would have to hire a staff of reporters and researchers to help because it couldn't be done as quickly as he wanted, and I certainly couldn't do it by myself. So then we brought on Matt and Matt's job initially, and correct me if I'm wrong, Matt, is he was going to supervise this staff of reporters and researchers.

And then he began sending me memos based on work that was beginning. And as I became more conscious of how big a task it was going to be and was so impressed with, you know Matt is such a good writer himself, I just said, “why don't we do this together?” So we ended up collaborating and I’m really glad we did because the whole thing went a lot more quickly and better, frankly, than it would've otherwise. So that's how this came about. But the origin of it was to make sure there was some documentation of what had gone on.

Weston Wamp: The obvious follow up seemed to be to ask them, “how do you summarize what actually had gone on?”

Matthew Teague: Well, the gist of it is that Trump and his close knit team tried to coordinate the theft of an American election. And they were chanting, “stop the steal,” but meanwhile, they were doing their very best to do just that. It wasn't a great or well organized attempt, but it was a close run thing in some places. And so Mark and I just set out to sort of document that. We watched January 6th unfold last year, sort of in horror, but we realized that an election, an American election, is not a centralized thing that happens in some building in Washington, D.C. that you can run into and overthrow, waving a spear and wearing helmet. It happens in counties and towns in the states across the U.S. And so that's where we set out to find the story, what actually happened in these places among largely unknown bureaucrats who were under enormous pressure from the political system.

Mark Bowden: And basically, they proceeded on three fronts. One was to organize these demonstrations and protests, which were, they were the Trump committee, the Trump group was doing everything they could to get people out in the streets and to put that kind of pressure. They were also pressuring election officials to falsify the election results, or to claim that the election results that they had were not accurate, even though there are all sorts of checks and balances in place so that these local officials were certain that they had a correct count. And then the third front of their effort was political and legal, where they were putting pressure on state legislators, primarily, and election officials to refuse to certify the vote count.

Mark Bowden: In some states, the certification takes place in the legislature. In some states, they have commissions that are set up to do this, but they targeted the most likely members, which in many cases turned out to be Republicans because they were the most susceptible to this pressure to refuse to certify the vote. And then of course, they went to court. They filed 61 separate lawsuits in the six swing states, all of which failed. And if you go through them as we do in the book, it isn't just that they failed, the judges just excoriated the lawyers for bringing such frivolous cases into their courtrooms. And in some cases since, we've seen lawyers discipline for just how shotty that legal work was. But that's what was going on, that's an overview of what was happening in the six swing states.

Weston Wamp: I then asked Matthew and Mark a question that I had been asked a week earlier in an interview with The New Yorker. In interviewing people involved in attempting to reverse the election, did it occur to them that there were two groups of people within the movement— those who actually believed the election was stolen and others who just saw a political path to reversing results they did not like.

Matthew Teague: One sort of handy question to keep in mind is as you interview people, I found, was to ask, “who's benefiting here?” And most of the heroes of our book were people who were, to our surprise, we weren't planning on it, they turned out to be Republicans. They believed in Trump largely, but they had the information in hand and they benefited from honesty and telling the truth, it was just their natural inclination. Whereas a lot of the people directly around Trump who were orchestrating things, benefited from lies, and so that's sort of an easy distinction to make.

Mark Bowden: Yeah, I agree with Matt. I mean, I think that the more, and I hesitate to use the word sophisticated because it's a relative term, but the more sophisticated people in this effort were very cynical. For instance, let's take Rudy Giuliani, who certainly understands the American election system. His strategy, which I kind of dub in the book, the “blunderbuss strategy” is just to seize upon every single allegation of fraud, no matter how ludicrous, no matter how obviously disproved. And all of it was equal in his approach, because the idea was to just throw up so many allegations of fraud, it didn't really matter if any of them could be proven or any of them could be successfully argued in a court of law. The idea was to create a cloud of suspicion so that even reasonable people might start to ask themselves, well, maybe something was wrong here, just because so many people are complaining about the election.

Weston Wamp: For the purposes of understanding how the allegations of a stolen election, devoid of evidence, were so widely believed, I asked them what part of the movement they estimated gained the most momentum.

Matthew Teague: Well, it was made up of so many different pieces. There wasn't really one front that gained momentum. The legal didn't, the political didn't really, none of the legislatures appointed false electors. The popular front did and that was because of the many pieces that they had packed into what Mark calls the blunderbuss. The blunderbuss was sort of in a colonial era shotgun type thing that you could stick broken nails and bits of glass and anything into it and blast it out into the landscape, but it didn't have to be particularly accurate. And so that was what was going on here, was that they packed all this stuff in, and as Mark said, people sort of believed it. So in the popular front, aided by people who again, were benefiting, Hannity, Tucker Carlson, these guys were making millions and millions of dollars off people's credulousness, really, people believed.

Mark Bowden: Yeah. I would say, I agree with Matt. The blunderbuss strategy worked and it worked in the sense that we see now reflected in polls, where a sizable portion of the electorate still is believing somehow that the election was stolen from Donald Trump, even though there's absolutely no evidence of that. And there would be evidence of it if it had happened. So I think we would have to say that they succeeded in convincing many people to be skeptical of the election results.

Weston Wamp: This is the part of the “stop the steal” movement that seemed like a failure of civics education to me. I asked the authors if they agreed with me, after their own exhaustive research, that due to the uniquely decentralized nature of our elections, it’s virtually impossible to rig an American election.

Mark Bowden: Totally agree. It would require such sweeping levels of dishonesty coordinated among hundreds of thousands of people who don't even know each other. It defies credibility. And the other piece of it that I feel is just not stressed enough is that we have such a clear idea in this country of what the election map looks like, we know right down to individual neighborhoods how the vote is likely to come out. The reason that there are six swing states is that there are only six states in the country that are not clearly going to go one way or another, where there's still enough of a margin of error. So the idea that you could introduce hundreds of thousands of fake ballots into an election, and that wouldn't completely skew the election map. I mean, look what happened in little Antrim County, Michigan, where, how many votes, a couple thousand votes got switched, right, Matt?

Matthew Teague: Yeah. Yeah. That's right.

Matthew Teague: There is a pinch point. And if Donald Trump has a particular gift, it's for finding places where there's a gap between what is strictly legal and what's just sort of accepted now, and that pinch point is the certification of votes. People don't have a very clear idea of how votes are certified, what's ceremonial, what's official in state legislatures and U.S. Congress. And we see it now, he's encouraging his followers to take these roles in places where the vote is counted or certified. I think at last count, there's almost two dozen, I think, Trump endorsed Biden election deniers, who are running for secretaries of state across the country. So there's clearly some shift afoot. But as for the vote itself, casting ballots, I think we could feel confident that it would be almost impossible to defraud that way.

Weston Wamp: Mark then took our conversation in a direction a “Swamp Stories” episode went in early 2021 about the election officials who worked hard to administer a free and fair 2020 election.

Mark Bowden: What I discovered was, let's take Maricopa County, Arizona for example, this is a Republican dominated district with a majority of Republicans on their board of supervisors. They're the ones responsible for running the election. Clint Hickman, who was the president of the board of supervisors, was a Trump supporter and a lifelong Republican. So in the evening on Election Day, as he's watching the televised results, when he sees Fox call Arizona for Biden, he's shocked. This has not happened in Maricopa County for a long time, but he's even more shocked an hour or so later when Donald Trump comes on TV and actually mentions Maricopa County as a place where the election was rigged. Well, Clint ran the election and so he knew it wasn't rigged. And even though they've been through, to satisfy everybody's curiosity about it at this point, I think they've been through about three or four complete recounts, all of which have shown that the results were accurate. He drew the line, frankly, at lying in order to support his candidate. And I think that's a line that most Americans would not cross.

Weston Wamp: I shared the story of former Maricopa County Recorder, Democrat Adrian Fontes, who was the top election official in Arizona’s biggest county where “fraud” supposedly took place — but who lost his own election on the same night Trump lost. Fontes’ story helps show why the narrative that there was a Democratic conspiracy to rig the election is so ridiculous.

Mark Bowden: I think that there's just something deeper going on here. And that is, people are always disappointed when their candidate loses in an election. And if you had polled Democrats in 2016, you probably would've found a majority claiming there was something wrong with the election because Donald Trump won. And their criticism basically lined up behind attacking the Electoral College, that we should get rid of the Electoral College. That was why Trump won because he lost the popular vote. So the change here is that you have a political leader who is encouraging people to believe that the election is fraudulent. And because most people don't understand how we run elections in this country, they're willing to buy that.

Mark Bowden: And the deeper problem is that, and I describe this in the book as, the modicum of trust that's absolutely necessary in order for democracy to survive. And that is you have to be willing to trust that the people that you disagree with are also Americans, they're American citizens. They believe in the system and they will run an honest election the next time out, win or lose. And that's pretty much been true throughout our history, even though there has been very sharp disagreements in politics throughout our history. I don't recall a past election where people just refused to accept, and I think that the reason for that is Trump. But he's playing upon, I think, something really dangerous that's afoot in American politics right now. And that is to demonize someone who doesn't share your political views. And if you do that, it really doesn't matter to the people who are orchestrating this, whether Trump really won or not, they just want to keep him in office. They don't want to give up the power.

Weston Wamp: The question I had been waiting to ask them is how close the country came to having a real problem on our hands, given all the experts they interviewed across the country to write the book, I was curious for their perspective. 

Matthew Teague: Well, I think there's a few different parts to that question. One is, how close did we come to a fraudulent vote? And I think the answer is nowhere near. I think the system is strong. But how close did Donald Trump come to overthrowing the election? Again, I don't think there really would've been any question as to whether he lost. He did. But how close did we come to a complete upheaval of the political system? I think very close. I think if Mike Pence had acted the way that Trump wanted him to on January 6th, I think we could have descended into something really, truly ugly. That's not something we address in the book per se, but that seems to be the case. What do you think, Mark?

Mark Bowden: I agree with you, Matt. I think Pence really deserves a lot of credit for putting his foot down. And I do agree that if Pence had decided to step out of his ceremonial role and allow this charade to take place where you would replace actual electors with fake ones, and throw things back into the Congress, it would've created a tumultuous situation. I also, I doubt that it would've worked, I mean I know when you read Eastman's memo, he says that the Democrats will howl, or he has some aligners that, well, Democrats will howl about this. Well, they wouldn't just howl about it. They would've torn down the building if they tried to steal the election out from under them. So I do think we came close to a lot uglier situation, but I don't think we came very close to overturning our system or keeping Trump in the White House.

Weston Wamp: In my own research for “Swamp Stories,” I’ve looked aggressively for irregularities at a scale that could have possibly affected the outcome of the election, but have found none. I was curious if Mark found anything that surprised him.

Mark Bowden: Most of it was pretty ridiculous and easy to dismiss, but the one point that I think makes you think is the thing, one thing that was truly different about the 2020 election was the number of mail-in votes. And so the idea of making it easier for people to vote, for people to vote by mail, I don't think, and the studies that I've seen indicate that mail-in voting is no more susceptible to fraud than voting in person. And there's no example of it having succeeded. And I've already made the point that if you alter the demographics of the election map with fake votes, it would be really obvious that you had. But that was a difference in the way that our elections are conducted, and so I don't really object to people wanting to take a hard look at whether we should continue to allow universal mail-in voting. I personally would be in favor of it, but I think that there's room there for reasonable people maybe to disagree. But if you tell me, as Greg Stinson did in Pennsylvania, that a hundred thousand fake ballots were inserted or Linny Stone in Arizona who says that she saw the signature of Satan in the election spreadsheets. It's the kind of thing that ordinarily would never even stop anybody for a second.

Weston Wamp: As we began to wrap up, I asked them where we go from here to avoid this ever happening again. 

Mark Bowden: I think that the two big things that we have to pay attention to are making sure that the votes are certified as cast. I think that we can shore up that system and make it very clear. And I don't think there's too many Americans other than fanatical Trump supporters who would disagree that the actual vote count ought to determine the victor in an election. And so I think we can shore up that process, which Trump tried to exploit. And the other thing is, I think election workers need to be protected. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a serious prosecution of anyone who issued death threats, or who stalked or protested on the front lawns of people who are doing their civic duty, by volunteering in most cases, to work on and collect and count these votes. Some of these people were harassed unmercifully, and I think people should go to jail for doing that.

Matthew Teague: Yeah. I think from my point of view, I think, transparency always helps. There should be no murkiness in what is the role of the vice president. What can Congress do? There should be total clarity in that. So think some reforms on that end. I think also it doesn't matter how good you make the process if people are still persuadable of falsehoods. And so I think the more educated people make themselves, the more involved in the process they get, the better off we'll be. What we found was that the difference between people who believed that the election was a fraud and were Republicans versus the people who were Republicans and knew that it was an accurate vote, was that they were part of the process. They had the accurate information before them, and it made them immune to some degree to the propaganda and lies that were coming out of Washington.

Weston Wamp: Final question, and they had alluded to the answer throughout the interview, who are the heroes and heroines of this story?

Matthew Teague: Oh, well, there are several that we highlight in the book and they ranged from sort of very public high level people like Brad Raffensperger in Georgia, secretary of state, who famously stood up to Trump over an hour long phone call in which Trump berated him and his staff and demanded that they find the 11,000 plus votes. Raffensperger, it may turn out, will pay for his truth by losing his seat, his position. We'll see. But it ranges from someone like that, all the way down to people like Cheryl Guy in Michigan, the county clerk who made an error. She's not very tech savvy, as she says, and she made an error and accidentally attributed a couple thousand votes to Biden that should have gone to Trump. One of them was probably her own. She's a Trump supporter and voted for Trump, but she made a mistake and within a few hours had corrected it and came forward to say, this was just a mistake on my behalf.

Matthew Teague: But the Trump campaign and people around him descended on Antrim County, Michigan in private jets coming in, in the night, overturning her office, looking for evidence of wrongdoing and sort of pressuring her to say that it was actually the machines, because if they could say it was Dominion machines that had made the mistake, then it's a widespread problem that they could cast doubt on the election across the entire U.S. But she very bravely and painfully said, “no, I made a mistake. It was my screw up.” And then all the way on down to sort of the ground level election workers like Ruby Freeman back in Georgia, who, for her trouble, as someone coming in for little or no money to help open ballot envelopes and things like that was cast as a villain, that she was not, it was sort of rocketed around the internet, her image and video, and was harassed for that. So these are the people who worked in pursuit of the truth and I think that's the most heroic thing they could have done.

Mark Bowden: Yeah. They were there in every state. Ron Bishop in Wisconsin, who was such a Trump supporter that he would put hundreds of Trump signs in his yard so other supporters could come by and take them and put them in their own yards. He ran workshops for door-to-door campaign workers to go out and knock on doors for Trump. When the election results came in, he told his friends and neighbors, there's nothing wrong with the election in Wisconsin. We just reformed it like two or four years ago. It worked the way it's supposed to work and Trump lost. Dean Knudson, who was on the elections commission who got up in front of a hostile group, and we write about this in the book, looking for him to endorse the idea that the election was a fraud.

Mark Bowden: He flat out said there was nothing wrong with this election. It was run honestly. He just stood up when it was hard to stand up. Clint Hickman and Bill Gates in Arizona. These guys were under tremendous pressure, they erected a gallows outside of the state house in Arizona calling for their execution. These are Republican members of the board of supervisors who knew damn well that the election was run fairly. And Aaron Van Langevelde in Michigan on the election committee who since lost his position because he refused to vote against certifying the election count. I think these are profiles in courage. I hope that people will read them a long time from now. And I hope that these people are recognized for doing the right thing when it was not easy.

Weston Wamp: On the next episode of “Swamp Stories,” we’re going to do our own profiles in courage and talk to election officials and election workers who stayed the course in 2020 and get their thoughts about the road ahead, including the increasing consensus that election workers deserve statutory protections as we approach the midterm elections.

Weston Wamp: Thanks for listening to “Swamp Stories,” presented by Issue One, the country's leading political reform organization that unites Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fix our broken political system. Please subscribe to the podcast and share it with your friends. Even better, rate and review it on iTunes to help us reach more listeners. You can find out more at swampstories.org. I'm your host Weston Wamp. A special thank you to executive producer, Ethan Rome, senior producer Evan Ottenfeld, producer Sydney Richards, and editor Parker from ParkerPodcasting.com. “Swamp Stories” was recorded in Tennessee, edited in Texas and can be found wherever you listen to podcasts.

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