In a conversation he didn’t know was being recorded, embattled Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito shared his private belief that his movement’s battle with secular forces in the country was a zero-sum contest of irreconcilable values.
“One side or the other is going to win,” Alito says in secretly recorded audio. Alito was speaking at a reception for the Supreme Court Historical Society last Monday evening. “I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. It’s not like you can split the difference.”
Alito was responding to a question from Lauren Windsor, a progressive advocacy journalist and activist who regularly records conversations with Republicans and conservative movement leaders.
Windsor is my guest on Deconstructed this week. We’re publishing the secret audio in partnership with Rolling Stone.
Windsor, who is making a documentary called “Gonzo for Democracy,” which will be out in the fall, reminded Alito that she had spoken with him a year earlier at the same event and wanted to ask him the same question. “What I asked you about was about the polarization in this country, about, like, how do we repair that rift?” she asked.
“Asking questions of judges, these are the most discreet people in public life. There’s a huge amount of secrecy around the Supreme Court decisions around justices,” Windsor tells Grim. “I’m asking the questions to try to expose true intent. And given that none of the justices will go to Congress, will make their views more publicly known, I feel that it’s of intense public interest to find out whether their decisions are guided by personal religious convictions that really have no place in our public life.”
[Deconstructed theme music.]
Ryan Grim: I’m Ryan Grim, and this is Deconstructed.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has come under intense scrutiny lately after the discovery that he had flown two flags associated with insurrectionary elements of the far right. On Monday, he had what he thought was a private conversation with what he thought was a right-wing ally at an event at the Supreme Court.
That person was actually Lauren Windsor, a progressive activist who has been a guest on this show before and who has spent years embedding within right-wing movements and recording her interactions. Lauren also spoke that evening with Chief Justice John Roberts, and the contrast between how Alito answered her questions and how Roberts answered her questions is truly startling.
Now before we play the clips, let’s welcome Lauren Windsor back to the show.
Lauren, thank you for being here.
Lauren Windsor: Thanks, Ryan.
RG: And so as we’ll hear in this recording, this wasn’t the first time you spoke with Alito. Can you set up the context of this conversation and your previous one?
LW: The initial conversation that I had with Justice Alito was in 2023, and I had asked him about the rising polarization in the country: “How do we heal this rift — this divide?”
And he answered pretty standardly of, “I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s not our role.” But my hunch was that his feelings might have changed in the course of the year when I had that initial conversation with him. It was several weeks, maybe a couple months after the ProPublica reporting on Clarence Thomas, but before the reporting that came out on Justice Alito. And the reporting only intensified from that point on.
The court’s really been under a very intense magnifying glass in the past year, and I figured that he might have a different response to that question this year. So, I went back this past Monday.
RG: Yeah, so he certainly did. I want to play a little bit of this conversation and get you to unpack what’s going on. And first of all, oftentimes, when you are recording somebody and having a conversation with somebody on the right, there’s some identity disguise going on or you’re pretending to be somebody you’re not.
In this case, you just told him your name and then had a conversation with him. At times, you were kind of indicating a conservative affinity that doesn’t exist. But in general, there wasn’t actually much other misdirection going on here, am I right?
LW: Right. I mean, I look like myself. I gave my name. I just misrepresented my true political ideology or ideological leanings.
RG: And what struck me is that this is not really behind closed doors. Like, it’s a private event, but not really private. Lots of people there.
LW: Yes, a lot of people. But I’ve only met him in these two separate times. So it’s not —
RG: So you’re mostly a stranger to him.
LW: Yes.
RG: This is him talking to a stranger, which I think is important context — that he’s going to be this revealing to a stranger. So let me play a little bit of this interaction.
LW: Hi, I wanted to say hello to you again. My name is Lauren. I met you last year. I think you already met my friend over here. So anyway, I wanted to just tell you— my husband wanted to be here, but he had a last-minute thing. And he was just like, “Make sure that you tell Justice Alito that he is a fighter and we appreciate him and he has all the grit.” And I know it’s gotta be terrible what your family, what you and your family are going through right now. So, I’m just so sorry.
Samuel Alito: Thank you. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
LW: But — and I’m sure you don’t remember this at all — but what I asked you about, was about the polarization in this country. About, like, how do we repair that rift? And, considering everything that’s been going on in the past year, you know, as a Catholic, and as someone who really cherishes my faith, I just don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in the way that needs to happen for the polarization to end. I think it is a matter of like, winning.
SA: I think you’re probably right. One side or the other — one side or the other is going to win. I don’t know, I mean, there can be a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So, it’s not like you’re going to split the difference.
RG: So, he tells you “One side or the other is going to win.” What was your reaction to his comment there?
LW: Well, so just for greater context into the framing of this: Asking questions of judges, these are the most discreet people in public life. There’s a huge amount of secrecy around the Supreme Court decisions around justices. I’ve talked to lower-level judges before and bring up an issue — abortion — and get shut down immediately. So the deliberative process in figuring out “How do I approach this?” was long.
I had to think about what are the things that I can say, and what are the things that I can’t say that are going to trigger him. But it’s obvious that he’s been aggrieved for some time. It’s obvious that he believes very strongly in his Catholic faith. And I think that framing the conversation in terms of morality and religion was an easier pathway than framing it in partisan terms. Because if I brought up Trump, for instance, I feel like he would have shut down pretty quickly. If I had said “Democrat” or “Republican,” I think it would have shut down pretty quickly. You notice that in the conversation, I said “the left.” That was deliberate. And when he said that one side was gonna win, I was like, gotcha.
This is exactly where I wanted him to go. And you never know where someone’s going to go beforehand, right? Like I can only go and have a conversation with someone. I can’t stuff words in their mouth.
I’m asking the questions to try to expose true intent. And given that none of the justices will go to Congress, will make their views more publicly known, I feel that it’s of intense public interest to find out whether their decisions are guided by personal religious convictions that really have no place in our public life.
RG: Yeah, and the fact that you went to Roberts at the same event with the same questions and got a completely different — and from my perspective — normal response from him shows that, OK, if you want to say he’s being entrapped or he’s being set up — A, like you said, discretion is the number one role, in public, of these Supreme Court justices. These are not amateurs when it comes to this question. But B, John Roberts showed how you can answer the question in a quite normal way if you don’t actually have the beliefs that Alito has.
I think you’re right to say that what it actually did was expose how he was feeling. So for people who couldn’t really follow along with that audio, you had said, basically, hey, I talked to you last year. I asked you about the polarization in this country and how we repair that rift. And then you said, considering everything that’s been going on in the past year as a Catholic and as someone who really cherishes my faith, I just don’t know that we can negotiate with the left in this way. But like, what needs to happen for the polarization to end? I think it is a matter of winning.
And he says, “I think you’re probably right. One side or the other is going to win.”
LW: I think it’s also really striking that he’s framing it in terms of one side or the other. Are there only two sides in this country? So, if he’s seeing this as two sides, of the left and the right, or Republicans and Democrats —
RG: Secular —
LW: Or Christians and non-Christians. He didn’t bring up all those multiple sides, right? There could be a lot of different sides, but he’s framing it as “One side is gonna win.” And to me, that reflects a partisan intent.
RG: You then, in your response, which we’ll play now, you kind of ramp up the religiosity in a way that, as I’m listening to it, I would have thought, alarm bells are going off in Alito’s mind at this point. Like, whoa, this is a conversation that is so far removed from how a Supreme Court justice ought to be talking about public policy and public life. But instead he dives right into it. So let me play from there.
LW: And that’s what I’m saying, I think that the solution really is, like, winning the moral argument. People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that to return our country to a place of godliness.
SA: Oh, I agree with you. I agree with you.
LW: Because if we look at the decline of our society, the decline of the nuclear family. Liberals, I just feel like, want to see that happen and proliferate. And I think we’ve been too permissive to say, “Oh, you know, OK.” I understand the Constitution. I understand —
RG: And so there, somebody comes and interrupts. And in general, I don’t like to hit public figures too much for just agreeing with people who they meet, like, in line. Like, a lot of people just want to be agreeable. But — we’ll play the John Roberts clip later — John Roberts had the same opportunity. He’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Christian nation? My Muslim friends wouldn’t agree with that. My Jewish friends wouldn’t agree with that.
But take us into this room here. Where does it go from there?
LW: Just to go back, to hit back on the point of the religiosity really being ramped up: There’s a very delicate approach, like, “How far can I actually go here?” And I’m not trying to come out the gate really hard. I’m trying to see if I can get him on this — it was a pretty aggressive question, the polarization thing, but I tied it into a previous question I’d already asked him. I tied it into his personal sense of aggrievement already over everything that he’s been going through for the past year.
So I felt like it was fertile territory. But if he had smacked me down there, I certainly wouldn’t have been able to ramp up the religiosity in that way. I would have needed to tiptoe a bit to see if I could get him to agree to something else.
RG: Yeah, and also asking him about polarization can also be the easiest softball ever. Like, we all just need to come together. We’re one country. Because this is pretty easy stuff to answer if that’s what you believe.
LW: But to me, it was also, polarization — it’s inherently political without having to say the words that are kind of triggering in these conversations with justices. In the guidelines for the event itself, they say, you can’t talk about any matters before the court, and doing so will have you thrown out.
So are they going to have you thrown out for attempting to talk to a justice about abortion? Maybe not, if you’re like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realize.” But certainly, my main goal was to get some sense of Trump immunity. Can we get [Alito] on the record voicing some kind of support, like, being in the can for Trump?
RG: Right. And that’s the context of this. For people who are not following the cases closely, the context for all of this: There was pressure on Alito to recuse himself from the upcoming Supreme Court review of whether the president has this — what kind of immunity the president has. And so how do you see this fitting into that question?
LW: Some of the things I’ve asked other people are, “How are we going to keep the Democrats from stealing the election again?” “What are you doing to make sure that the Democrats aren’t stealing it?” “We don’t have the same positions of power we did before, but we have the court. Like, what can we do? What are we doing to make sure that we don’t lose this by fraud again?”
For listeners who aren’t aware of my background, I’ve been reporting extensively on election deniers and the ongoing threats to democracy. And I’m producing a documentary called “Gonzo for Democracy.”
This is, to me, the pinnacle of the threat at hand in 2024: Do we want to be a Christian theocracy, or do we want to maintain this American tradition of secular society? And getting an indication that he’s in the can for Trump, giving him immunity, stalling things, voting in his favor. I think people suspect it, but it’s a much different thing when you have audio proof of it or visual proof of it.
RG: Right. You would think it would put pressure on him as he’s thinking about that case or as he’s weighing whether or not to recuse. But the way that he frames it as the zero-sum competition is intense.
And just for people who couldn’t quite hear that recording, you said, I think the solution really is winning the moral argument. People in this country who believe in God have got to keep fighting for that to return our country to a place of godliness. And he said, “I agree with you. I agree with you.”
So before we go to the 2023 conversation, which I think is really interesting too, let’s juxtapose John Roberts here. Had you spoken with Roberts before or after Alito that evening, by the way?
LW: It was after Alito.
RG: Let’s just play a little Roberts, and then we’ll talk about his conversation, which I think puts in really stark relief how radical what you heard from Alito is.
LW: I just want to ask you, like, specifically with everything that’s going on right now — it’s a very tumultuous time in the country. I’m just curious, from your perspective on the court: How do we start to repair that polarization?
John Roberts: The first thing, I think, is to tell me when the non-tumultuous time has been here. I mean, you look at the court, what the court was doing in the ’60s, what the court was doing during the New Deal, what the court was doing after Dred Scott, and all this — it’s kind of a regular thing. People think it’s been so different and special. It’s been pretty tumultuous for a long time.
LW: So you think this is a normal period?
JR: You know, I don’t know if it’s normal. I mean, since I’ve been here, oh, 20 years, there have been quieter times. But the idea that the court is in the middle of a lot of tumultuous stuff going on, that’s nothing new.
RG: I mean, that’s like a pretty fair analysis of the Supreme Court’s role in history, right? Or do you disagree? What do you think?
LW: I think he —
RG: And also safe. It’s also very safe.
LW: It is very safe.
RG: Like, if you’re talking to a stranger, these are platitudes.
LW: They are platitudes. But I think that he caught himself sort of downplaying the, I think, seriousness of the situation in the country right now and course corrected. Because you hear him saying, it’s not that bad, it’s not that bad, look at all these previous times in history. And then he catches himself and says, it’s not great.
I forget the exact phraseology of it. He’s, like, don’t get me wrong. It’s not great right now, but we could be at war. It could be Vietnam. And it’s like, yeah, I mean, we’re not shooting each other yet, but there was a violent insurrection on January 6, which, obviously, I wouldn’t have brought up in that context.
RG: And the times that he compares it to are quite remarkable moments in American history. So in a sense, he’s saying, OK, yes, it is an abnormal time period, but we’ve had lots of abnormal time periods before.
And the ones he mentions are huge moments in American history. The Dred Scott and then the Civil War, the New Deal, and then the civil rights era. These are probably the pinnacles over the last couple hundred years of intensity of the American republic conflict.
Let’s go from there.
LW: I guess I wouldn’t say that it’s not like it’s an innovative thing. It’s not new. I guess, I really feel like we’re at a point in our country where the polarization is so extreme that it might be irreparable.
JR: Oh, I don’t think that.
LW: And I think —
JR: Polarization that extreme is like the Civil War. We did that. During Vietnam, people were getting killed. And, I mean, I was there in Vietnam. This is all right. I mean, it’s not all right, but it’s not like it’s as dramatically different — it’s a common thing people with their own perspective think, this is so extraordinary. Eh, I don’t know.
LW: But you don’t think there’s a role for the court in guiding us toward a more moral path?
JR: No, I think the role for the court is deciding the cases. If I start — Would you want me to be in charge of guiding us toward a more moral path? That’s for the people we elect. That’s not for lawyers.
RG: So, again, that’s the kind of answer that if you’re at a confirmation hearing or talking to a stranger at a reception that you would give. So, at this point, what are you thinking in this conversation?
LW: I was trying to get as much detail out of him as possible. It was clear to me that he was not going to answer in the way that Alito did. But I felt that if I were more aggressive about Christian nation and the Supreme Court having the role in guiding us there — notice the difference in the language between that and Alito?
I did push it harder with Roberts in that moment because I felt, like, we’re after the dinner. I don’t really don’t have anything to lose. They’re not gonna kick me out. Let’s see how strongly he will react to that. And I thought that the answer was great as a counterpoint to Alito, because I was very explicit and the Supreme Court should have a role in guiding our morality, you know, we are a Christian nation. And he, to my surprise, pushed back on both counts. I was happy that he did so, but it sort of belies the fact that he is enabling the justices on the court who are actually much more forthright in their religious convictions.
RG: I think that’s a good point: that John Roberts knows Sam Alito.
He knows what Sam Alito believes. We may all be learning the truth about what he really believes now. But John Roberts has known for a very long time, but also Alito’s defenders and your critics after this comes out are going to say, well, she baited him. This isn’t really what he thinks. But I would underscore your point there.
This is how you can answer these questions. Like if you believe in the traditional role of a Supreme Court justice and how they ought to be presenting themselves in public and comporting themselves in private. If you’re Alito and you’re more of a revolutionary, you’re just telling strangers that it’s a zero-sum game.
And so the next one I thought was even more powerful in its rebuttal of your questions. So let’s roll that.
LW: I guess, I just believe that the founders were godly, like, were Christians. And I think that we live in a Christian nation and that our Supreme Court should be guiding us in that path.
John Roberts: I don’t know if that’s true. Yeah, I don’t know if we live in a Christian nation. I know a lot of Jewish and Muslim friends who would say, maybe not. And it’s not our job to do that. It’s our job to decide the cases as best we can.
RG: So he says, when you say we live in a Christian nation, he says, “I don’t know that we live in a Christian nation. I know a lot of Jewish and Muslim friends who would say, maybe not. And it’s not our job to do that. It’s our job to decide the cases as best we can.” That’s how a normal Supreme Court justice would answer that question, right?
LW: I would think so, yes. I think about normal and it’s so relative, with the current set of crazy that we have.
RG: He’s abnormal in that in his crew, maybe.
LW: Well, I mean, as the chief justice, he has this, has got to portray himself as being a very fair minded, neutral arbiter. Whereas, I really believe that Alito is so aggrieved and feeling so empowered by the majority that he can get away with anything and no one’s going to do anything to hold him accountable.
And you see that with Congress. The Senate Democrats should be hauling them in for questioning. They may not have the political will to remove a justice from the court, but there should definitely be public hearings on what’s going on.
RG: So then from here, the conversation ends with this:
JW: It’s a much more modest job than I think people realize.
LW: I don’t want to monopolize your time. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
JW: Not at all.
LW: Thank you so much.
RG: Yes, he just says, “It’s a much more modest job” than we think. But that’s not exactly true. Like, the Supreme Court is currently upending American culture. And so it does feel like he feels like his job is to help shepherd Alito’s vision, but make it seem like they’re just deciding the cases.
LW: Palatable. I mean, he’s the enabler on the court. I just doubt his sincerity. I think that there’s religious conviction there that for him to display would not be appropriate and it would hinder his ability to get it shepherded through.
RG: So let’s go back to some of the 2023 conversation you had with Alito just to see. Because I think you’re right to highlight that change in his demeanor or his willingness to speak out over the last year.
LW: I just want to ask something. I want to be totally appropriate with the jurisprudence of it all.
SA: Yeah.
LW: Just to be totally candid: How do we get America back to a place of less polarization? Because I feel like the court is undergoing this period of turmoil. People don’t trust in, I think — this is like the last bastion of public trust. And how do we get back to that?
SA: I wish I knew. I don’t know. It’s easy to blame the media, but I do blame them. Because they do nothing but criticize us. And so they have really eroded trust in the court. I don’t know. I really don’t know. Ordinary people — ordinary isn’t the right word — American citizens, in general, need to work on this, to try to heal this polarization because it’s very dangerous. I do believe it’s very dangerous.
RG: Which parts do you think we should hit here? Like any jump out at you?
LW: He just says, I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s not our role, I think, is the response, and to me that stands in stark contrast to how he responded this year. He could have responded in the same way that he did last year, so.
RG: And so he comes out of this really swinging at the media. What had him so worked up at the media at the time?
LW: Well, contextually, this was just after the ProPublica reporting on Clarence Thomas. So I think the media continues to be a source of grievance for him, particularly since the spotlight is now on him.
RG: And then he finishes it at the end talking about how everybody needs to overcome the polarization. That felt more boilerplate to me. The kind of thing you would expect maybe from a justice. What were your two different impressions from those two different conversations?
LW: You know, I didn’t — I thought it was going to be really hard to crack that nut, so to speak — of getting something substantive from Alito. And so in 2023, when coming out of it with that interaction, it was interesting, but it wasn’t — there was not a there there. It wouldn’t have been news, aside from, I would have been the news, because it would have been, “Oh, we have this secret recording of Sam Alito.” And there wouldn’t have been anything — there just wasn’t anything newsworthy to me in that. It’s color to what was going on at the time with the Dobbs leaker stuff, but there wasn’t anything really sticky in my mind there. And so for me, I was just wanting to figure out, “OK, how can I build on that so that I can have another go at him in the following year?”
And so when I came away from this conversation, obviously, very happy with how that turned out vis a vis the prior one, but looking at them side by side, it’s hard to say whether or not he always felt that way in 2023 and just had a better job of hiding it, or if it’s more of an evolution over the past year, given the increased media scrutiny on him and Clarence Thomas.
RG: So when this comes out, there’s going to be a lot of scrutiny on you too. People are going to be going through everything you’ve done and going after your past work. How are you preparing for that? Are you ready for that?
LW: I mean, I’m a lowly advocacy reporter. If people want to dig through my past reporting, they’re welcome to do that. I feel like I’m pretty straightforward about who I am, so.
RG: Yeah, it’s interesting. You are undercover, sort of. But also like you said, pretty transparent. Like, when you started doing this many years ago, I thought you maybe had a six-month shelf life before the word went out: “You see this person, BOLO — be on the lookout — for this person, and stop saying insane things to this person because she’s probably recording you.” Yet here we are many years later, and people are still — because it’s not like you’re putting on wigs. I mean, maybe once in a while, but —
LW: I have a couple of wigs, actually, that Kathy Griffin gave me.
RG: What kind of wigs?
LW: One of them is —
RG: In all the videos I see of you, it’s pretty much you.
LW: Yes, I mean, I’m trying generally not to have pictures out there of me wearing one of the wigs because that would defeat the purpose. But she gave me one that was human hair that’s got a very sort of ’70s style to it. And then the other one has a more like kind of rock and roll, like libertarian vibe.
RG: And some of your reporting has been obtaining leaked audio. I remember you had a really big scoop at that Koch conference back in, what was that, 2012 or something?
LW: So that was the summer of 2014, and I had a source give me several hours of audio from the conference. I was on site in the days preceding the conference, but they shut down the complex during the conference itself.
RG: To save some of the Republican operatives some Google searches, what are some of your favorite hits you’ve had over the years?
LW: Well, the Koch brothers was definitely, definitely a big one because—
RG: And we published that over at the Huffington Post, as I recall.
LW: Yes, we did partner with you, and the lead anchor was The Nation. It was, Huffington Post was helping, and then Salon with Joan Walsh. Being an activist for campaign finance reform, being able to write a story about Mitch McConnell — who was giving a speech about campaign finance reform at that conference — was really personally fulfilling for me, because in the speech, he says the worst day of his political life was when McCain–Feingold was passed.
And this is a man who has spent decades in the Senate and, you know, you could pick a lot of different things to be the worst day of your political life: the Iraq War, or 9/11, or the 2008 financial meltdown.
RG: Modest rules on campaign financing — that was his Armageddon.
LW: Actually, some version of how I phrased that was included in a speech that Bill Clinton gave to the Harkin Steak Fry that year. And I was just over the moon, like, oh my God, I said this and basically my words are coming out of Bill Clinton’s mouth. This is insane.
But then also I’d gotten a tip from someone on the hill that Harry Reid was going to be going on the floor of the Senate to call on Mitch McConnell to repudiate remarks that were made at the Koch retreat.
And so I made it to the stakeout and set up my camera next to all the broadcast cameras. And I asked Mitch McConnell, “Are you going to repudiate those remarks?” And so we had a face-off in the Senate hall, where they do the stakeout. It was the second question that he took, and I was so nervous, like, “Oh my God, I’m facing off my campaign finance dark-money nemesis right now.”
And he just, he acted like he didn’t hear. And so I repeated myself, and then he was like [exhale], and turned and didn’t even bother to utter a single word. It was so anticlimactic because I was — but, you know, I felt like I had really achieved something for myself. I don’t know. It was important to me.
RG: That is a really interesting Mitch McConnell innovation. I’ve seen him do it dozens of times. All politicians think you have to say something. You have to say, I’m not going to comment on that, at a minimum. He has discovered that you can just not open your mouth. And eventually the world will move on. It’s the creepiest thing.
LW: It was. I felt so dejected. I’m not even worthy of a one-word response. Like, no.
RG: Every Capitol Hill reporter has stories of putting a recorder in front of him and asking him questions as you’re walking down the hall toward his office or from his office to the Senate floor or something and you’re like, “Am I speaking? Did I just think my question? Did I not say it out loud? Because he’s acting like he didn’t even hear me.” It’s the most — unnerving is exactly right. It’s very unnerving.
And so the last time we had you on CounterPoints, the show I do on Wednesdays and Fridays, that one was one that panned out. You were talking to a member of Congress who was friends with Amy Coney Barrett before she was nominated, before she was confirmed is my memory, correct me if I’m wrong. And he said, she has told me that she wants to be the deciding vote on overturning Roe v. Wade. Do you remember that one?
LW: It was Mike Johnson, actually.
RG: Oh, that’s right, Mike Johnson! Because at the time, I’m like Mike Johnson, some backbench nobody. Now he’s speaker of the House.
LW: Yeah, well, so he was at a conference, it was Rick Santorum, his Patriot [Voices] lobby day on the hill, but he was one of the speakers and we were asking about abortion-related stuff. And he [said], “Yeah, we’re making progress.” And I remember this was back in 2021, mind you, and I haven’t reviewed that in a while, but it was essentially, “We’re making progress. And when we have the court, I think that Amy Coney Barrett will be the one to author the opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
RG: Oh, that was off slightly.
LW: Slightly.
RG: It was Alito that ended up authoring it. But maybe Mike Johnson didn’t understand how seniority works there. He was right that she was willing, immediately, to vote to overturn it. That she didn’t have any sense that decorum or respect for the past and the precedent requires us to wait a couple of years. She’s like, no, we have the shot to do it now. Let’s do it.
LW: I don’t remember him recounting the conversation in quite that way with her.
RG: No, that’s my analysis of it.
LW: He was very excited about the imminent overturning of Roe v. Wade and that Amy Coney Barrett would be the one to author the opinion.
RG: What are some other big hits?
LW: Well, the ones that, to me, are the most personally important [is] the Tommy Tuberville one, where he’s saying that he’s gonna be the Senate challenger to the 2020 election results. Like the pair to Mo Brooks, which would make the challenge to the Electoral College possible.
I had suspected that this was afoot. And it was such a crazy thing in D.C. because there was this conventional wisdom of “Mitch McConnell is going to be the majority leader.” You know, people just didn’t think that Democrats could win those two Senate seats, one, and two, Mo Brooks and the Freedom Caucus are making all this noise over in the House about challenging the Electoral College. And everyone dismissed it as, “Well, that’s not serious. They’re not actually going to get that going. They have to have somebody in the Senate that’s going to do it too.”
And the Senate is, I guess some magical place of decorum. You think that there’s not somebody that’s going to pair with Mo Brooks on this? And, you know, sure enough, Georgia was the perfect place to find out because we had a historic double runoff. So everyone in the GOP was campaigning throughout the state. So I got Tuberville at a campaign event with Madison Cawthorn and Byron Donalds. And Madison kept talking about, you know, we still have tricks up our sleeve. We still have our cards on the table.
One of those, and Tuberville spoke, and he was saying like, keep fighting for Trump. And this is mid-December. It’s like, why would you tell people to keep fighting for Trump? The election’s over. And so when he walked out the door, “Madison said y’all still have tricks up your sleeve. What are you going to do to fight for President Trump?”
“Well, you’ve seen what they’re doing over in the House. We’re going to have to do it in the Senate too.” And so it just exploded. It ricocheted all over the place. And then the following day I asked David Perdue the same thing. And even though he couldn’t technically do that because of the way his term ended, when I asked him, “What are you going to do to fight for President Trump? Are you going to challenge [the] Electoral College?” And he was like, Yes, ma’am, I am.
You remember I called you that day and I was, like, “Ah, you know, my recorder malfunctioned. So all I have is a picture with him but he told me this, I swear to God.” So I just ran the picture and what he told me. And Donald Trump quote-tweeted it and said, that’s because David’s a great patriot. Thank you for your hard work, Lauren.
Calling me out. And at that moment, just everything blew up — everything. It was insane.
RG: You and I have talked about this before. I’m curious for your take looking back now. Do you think that they were going to do it anyway? Like was Tuberville going to do it, definitely? And he was just waiting to announce it? Or do you think he got caught up in the moment, and your question helped to spring it out of him?
LW: I think that it was all afoot. They were being very coy. The different people that I talked to on the campaign trail — like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Kelly Loeffler — at their campaign events, we talked about, we still have things we’re working on. And I talked to Madison Cawthorn too. And Madison was more explicit. Like, yeah, we have a Hail Mary. Yeah, I was like, you think you’re going to be able to do it? Think you’re gonna be able to challenge the Electoral College? Well, yeah, I mean, it’s a Hail Mary, but we think we can do it.
RG: That’s my sense too, that they were working it up. And what you did was you kind of pried it out and made it public. which should have then given Democrats three weeks to prepare for it since now Trump, himself, is like talking about it from his Twitter account and then later is like, be there. It’s going to be wild.
LW: Well, he amped up the whole thing. I mean, that reporting really changed the narrative in Georgia because they didn’t want to talk about overturning the election. They didn’t want to talk about challenging the Electoral College for sure. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue wanted to talk about the economy and the Covid pandemic.
So, the fact that Trump was able to hijack all the conversation there and make it solely about pressuring political officials in Georgia to overturn the election, I think was key, to Democrats winning the Senate, because I don’t think that Georgia voters wanted to go down that road.
RG: That’s probably fair. The $2,000 check promises played obviously a big role too in getting out Democratic base turnout. And just all people who like $2,000. But yes, no question, Perdue and Loeffler desperately wanted to talk about anything but the last election, especially because the more you talked about how the last election was “rigged,” then the less chance that Republicans were going to turn out just because of the logic of A and B: Did you fix the process? Did you un-rig it since November? Why am I gonna waste my time, if the whole thing’s rigged?
LW: Exactly. And I certainly don’t mean to imply that my reporting was the sole factor in those two Democratic wins. I think that, for me, my role to play in reporting during that historic runoff was to say: This is what’s at stake right now, like exposing what they were willing to do — the lengths they were willing to go to overturn the election. And I absolutely think that it made an impact in those races.
Was it decisive? Who knows. You can never say in an election because there’s so many different factors, right? And a lot of that’s due to the hard organizing work that Fair Fight Action and others put in to organize Democratic voters.
RG: And tell me more about your documentary. What’s it about? What’s the status of it when? When do you expect it to be out?
LW: So we’re trying to get it out in September. We produced a short that we submitted to Tribeca. And this was a very last-minute thing. We submitted it at the very last possible minute that we could submit it. And so it wasn’t perfect, but I felt like it was good enough to submit. I wanted to try to get it over that finish line because it would be important for fundraising to complete the film. But there’s a fair amount of polishing that needs to happen before doing some screenings, which I’m in the process of doing — setting up screenings, rather, in order to find the remaining funding to complete the feature.
There’s additional reporting that I’m doing and that has to take shape. And a big piece of that is work we’ve done at American Family Voices on factory towns. Factory Towns is a research project spearheaded by my partner, Mike Lux. And it really delves into working-class voters in industrial areas throughout the Midwest and Pennsylvania. What used to be this blue wall that flips. A lot of these voters, they voted for Obama and then became Trump voters. Why did that happen? How do you message to these voters to get them to embrace progressive populism, progressive economics? And I think that the story with that, it’s really a story of the rise of Trumpism, and a lot of it closely hues to the arc of my political career.
My activism came out of Occupy Wall Street. So, so much of the factory towns’ phenomenon was, I think, a backlash to the financial meltdown. A lot of these folks just haven’t recovered financially. And for me, I was living in LA, the epicenter of the mortgage meltdown, and felt it really intensely. And it’s one of the major — the major catalyst for me [in] finally leaving, like, pursuing a career in fashion design, and embracing, finally, just diving into reporting.
I became a protest junkie. I traveled around the country. And so “Gonzo” tells the story of, how did we get to January 6 in the first place as a country? The rise of Trumpism. And how do we never go there again? But vis a vis my journey, this quest to expose election deniers and hold them accountable. So it ties the dots — not ties the dots, connects the dots between my past reporting with like Tommy Tuberville and Ron Johnson and John Eastman; and then, it will have a lot of unpublished material. So we’re hoping to break some news within the documentary.
RG: What do you hope comes from this Alito reporting that’s coming out now?
LW: I mean, I would love to see a recusal in the Trump immunity decision. I don’t know that they’re ultimately going to grant him immunity. And I don’t know enough about how they could potentially rule from a court watch or perch. I suspect that they wouldn’t be willing to give him immunity.
RG: Him being Trump.
LW: Yes, him being Trump, just because it would be pretty outrageous, I think, departure from norms within our society, like within Supreme Court jurisprudence. But I think ultimately, I would like to see some accountability. What does that look like?
I’m not sure that Democrats — they haven’t had the political will to do it. And I’m hoping that this gives them some public outrage to fuel some political will to hold some hearings.
For me, personally, it outrages me when I see that just because something isn’t politically possible, like, OK, you don’t have the votes to force an ethics law. OK, you don’t have the votes to force removal of a justice. You have to change the window of what the public discourse is. If you don’t have the public will, the political will, you’ve got to create it, right? You have to make the public aware and be angry and force your hand.
Like Obama famously would be, like, you know, I may not do X, Y, Z, but make me do it. OK. Organize. But I just feel like there’s a lot of laziness. People just want the path of least resistance, and it’s really disheartening and it’s a lot of what becomes demoralizing to voters.
RG: And people can’t really pretend anymore they don’t know who Alito is at this point. You know, there’s that old phrase: When people tell you who they are, believe them. He’s being pretty clear here.
LW: I think so. And do with that information what you will. But for me, all I can do as a reporter is to present the information, expose the truth or the most evidence of what that truth is and to capture it on audio to have that conversation with him. And it’s not like me recounting it to you because we had the conversation and then I wrote it down. You can hear him say it with his own voice. I don’t know how more clear it can be to you. I mean, he’s not gonna hold a press conference to talk about it.
RG: Lauren Windsor, where can people find your stuff?
LW: You can go to laurenwindsor.com and that will give you links to my various projects. But I think the easiest way to get to me would be on Twitter, @LaWindsor.
RG: That was Lauren Windsor, and that’s our show.
Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. Legal review by David Bralow, Shawn Musgrave, and Elizabeth Sanchez. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw.
And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief for The Intercept.
If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show, so you can hear it every week. And please go and leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show. Also check out our other podcast, Intercepted.
If you want to give us additional feedback, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. Put “Deconstructed” in the subject line. Otherwise, we might miss your message.
Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you soon.