Maybe Sullivan was ready to support Trump’s coup
- Rich Moniak
- Oct 31
- 3 min read
By Rich Moniak
In a letter sent to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last week, attorneys for Jack Smith said they were “compelled to correct inaccurate assertions made by you and others concerning the issuance of a grand jury subpoena for the toll records of eight Senators and one Member of the House of Representatives.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan is one of those senators. And it’s fair to wonder why Smith is essentially arguing that he and his eight colleagues are lying.
The subpoena at the heart of their complaint involved routing information of calls to and from their cell phones during the four days surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. Sullivan deliberately mischaracterized it as surveillance by the Biden administration.
Smith was the special counsel who in 2023 secured a four-count indictment against then-former President Donald Trump for his ill-fated attempt to overturn the 2020 election. As his attorneys explained in their letter, “toll records merely contain telephonic routing information — collected after the calls have taken place — identifying incoming and outgoing call numbers, the time of the calls, and their duration.” They “do not include the content of calls.”
The reason Smith sought those records is not only simple. It’s something the targets of the subpoena should have expected.
After Congress finally got around to certifying the electoral college results, Sullivan issued a statement noting the fact that “no Supreme Court justice, state or federal judge, state legislature or governor has found sufficient evidence to overturn any state’s election results.”
He also said none of the swing states “submitted competing or multiple slates of electoral votes.” But we know now that Republican operatives in five of them transmitted illegitimate slates to then-Vice President Mike Pence.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer who led the legal fight challenging the election results, was a leader in that fraudulent scheme too. We know he made two phone calls to Sullivan on Jan. 6. That fact was revealed almost two years later when the Select Committee investigating the insurrection published its final report. When asked about it, Sullivan claimed he didn’t answer the calls that day because he didn’t recognize the number. And when he finally got around to listening to the messages, he said it was evident that Giuliani called the wrong number.
I argued back then he should have voluntarily provided those messages to the Select Committee. Instead, he faulted them for not reaching out to ask him about the calls. However, at that point he should have known they would be of interest to Smith’s investigation.
One possible motive behind lying about the substance of the subpoena is to aid and abet Trump’s political retribution campaign. Rewriting history is a necessary piece of that.
But here’s the real tell that Sullivan and his gang are less interested in the truth than furthering Trump’s Big Lie. They accuse Smith’s team of going on a “fishing expedition for one simple reason: we are Republicans who support President Trump.”
Claiming others are targeted for supporting him is a ploy Trump uses whenever he’s confronted with incriminating facts. “They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” he said while campaigning a year ago. “And in the end, they're not after me. They're after you, and I just happen to be standing in their way.”
The truth is he’s trapped by the lie he’s been telling for almost five years. He’s told it so many times that rewriting history and punishing everyone who tried to hold him accountable is the only way he can avoid being revealed as a total fraud.
“The 2020 Presidential Election, being Rigged and Stolen, is a far bigger SCANDAL” than the FBI indictment of “NBA players cheating at cards,” he wrote in a social media post last weekend. “We now know everything,” he added, while calling on loyalists in the Department of Justice to prosecute the imagined election theft “with as much ‘gusto’ as befitting the biggest SCANDAL in American history!”
Long ago I stopped expecting Sullivan to refute that lie. I used to think it was because he was afraid of falling out of favor with Trump and his supporters. But after seeing his reaction to Smith’s subpoenas, I think it’s fair to wonder if he failed to disclose the calls Giuliani made to him because he’d been preparing to participate in Trump’s criminal scheme to remain in power.
• Rich Moniak has been a resident of Juneau since 1990. He retired in 2014 after a 35-year engineering career. He was also a regular contributor to the Juneau Empire for 18 years.
