The Big Lie Page 5

  “Honestly? Because he specifically told me not to hire you.”

  All doubts about Charlotte’s veracity suddenly evaporated.

  “How soon can we meet?” Jack asked.

  Chapter 8

  They met the following morning at Jack’s office.

  Jack Swyteck, P.A., was part of a neighborhood in transition, where historic residences were transforming into art studios, restaurants, and professional office space. Jack practiced out of a house dating back to the 1920s, ancient by Miami standards, built in the old Florida style with a coral-rock façade and a big covered porch that cried out for a rocking chair and whittling stick.

  “Love your office,” said Charlotte. “Funny, I had you pegged for a high-rise on Brickell Avenue, all glass and glitz.”

  “I like the sense of history here.”

  Lots of history. The previous owner was the Freedom Institute, where Jack had worked as a young attorney fresh out of law school. Four years of defending death-row inmates proved to be enough for Jack, so he struck out on his own as a sole practitioner. A decade later, when his mentor passed away and the Institute was on the brink of financial collapse, Jack came up with a plan to save it, which eventually meant buying the building. The Freedom Institute operated rent-free upstairs in the renovated bedrooms. Initially, Jack barely did well enough to fix the broken pipes and leaky roof, but things picked up. The original floors of Dade County pine were sanded and refinished. The high ceilings and crown moldings were restored. Bad fluorescent lighting, circa 1975, had been replaced in a total electrical update. The furnishings were upgraded with an eclectic mix of modern minimalist décor and period antiques.

  “I tried to get Madeline to fix up our office like this,” said Charlotte. “She wouldn’t spend a dime. Clients would stop by, expecting the usual trappings of a successful lobbying firm. Instead, they got musty rooms cluttered with paper, files, and old bankers’ boxes.”

  Jack led Charlotte to a sitting area near a stone fireplace. They were in what once was the dining room, seated in matching armchairs.

  “Tell me something about yourself. Where’d you grow up?”

  Charlotte Holmes was raised in Florida’s Panhandle, aka “Southern Alabama,” steeped in gun culture. Her father was an avid hunter. He had no sons and, by God, at least one of his five daughters was going to be a hunter. It fell to Charlotte. She owned a Davey Crickett .22 single-shot rifle before she was ten, and it became a way of life. Guns were purely sport for Charlotte, until she and her closest sister went off to college and roomed together at Florida State University. One night, Charlotte’s sister didn’t come home. They found her in the woods, half-naked and unconscious. A newspaper story the next day included a quote from a Tallahassee gun lobbyist: “These things wouldn’t happen if these college girls would have the sense to protect themselves and learn to use a gun.”

  “I was furious,” said Charlotte. “So I got in my car and went to see this big-mouth jerk named Madeline Chisel.”

  “Is that really how you met?”

  “True story. It was my intention to tell her where to go. By the time I left her office, I was a fan.”

  “When did you start working for her?”

  “A few years later. Right out of college, I went to work for a not-for-profit organization that helped victims of sexual assault. The more young women I met, the more I came to believe that Madeline was right: women need to protect themselves, and anyone who would feel safer with a gun has every right to own one. I was about twenty-five when I reconnected with Madeline. By then she was the go-to gun lobbyist in the country. It was more work than she could handle. She offered me a job, and I took it on the spot.”

  “Did you like what you were doing?”

  “Loved everything about it. I loved the work, loved being in the state capital, and firmly believed that we were on the right side of the Second Amendment argument. Madeline took me under her wing. By the time I was thirty, it was pretty clear to everyone that she was grooming me to follow in her footsteps when she retired.”

  “I take it that’s no longer the plan.”

  “No. I resigned.”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t cast my electoral vote for Senator Stahl if I’m working for Madeline Chisel. It’s not my intention to hurt or embarrass her. This is my decision, and I don’t want anyone to get the impression that it has anything to do with Madeline.”

  “Have you told anyone in the Republican Party that you intend to vote for Stahl?”

  “I think the White House got the drift when I dodged the meeting with President MacLeod on his victory tour through Florida.”

  “What about on the Democratic side? Have you told anyone ‘I’m voting for Stahl?’”

  “Not explicitly. But I’m sure they inferred as much when I called Mr. Kipner and said I was planning to vote my conscience.”

  “Why does your conscience tell you to vote for Stahl?”

  “Why does that matter? From a legal standpoint, I mean.”

  “It probably doesn’t, as long as this really is a matter of conscience. Let me ask it a different way. Are you voting for Senator Stahl because someone threatened you?”

  “No.”

  “Are you voting for Stahl in exchange for money?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Has anybody promised you anything in exchange for changing your vote?”

  “No.”

  “As your lawyer, I’ll have an easier time convincing people that there are no external influences, if I understand what’s driving you.”

  “That makes sense. And I suppose at some point we can get into all that. But none of it matters if I can’t legally change my vote, does it?”

  “That’s true,” said Jack.

  “Then let’s start the conversation there. I’ve been listening to the legal experts on television, just like everyone else. Some say members of the Electoral College are bound by party lines. Some say we’re not. So I need a legal opinion. The bottom line is that Florida went Republican, even if it was only by eight thousand votes. As a Republican elector, am I legally bound to vote for the Republican candidate? Or can I vote for Senator Stahl?”

  Jack recognized the importance of the issue and the potential ramifications, not just for Charlotte but for the country. He hoped he was being objective.

  “I’ve been looking into this since the election, mostly out of curiosity. I was up late reading last night, after you called. I can explain my legal reasoning to you, but here’s my bottom line: No, you are not bound to cast your vote for President MacLeod.”

  “Are you saying that because you voted for Senator Stahl?”

  “No. I’m saying it because that’s how I read the statute.”

  “Good.”

  “But here’s the disclaimer. There are about a hundred thousand members of the Florida Bar. Probably twenty thousand of them would agree or disagree with me without even bothering to read the statute. The only thing to inform their analysis would be whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat.”

  “I see.”

  “But here’s a piece of advice you’d get from any lawyer, regardless of party affiliation.”

  “What?”

  “Stop talking about it. You’ve brought enough attention to yourself already. Don’t tell another soul what you intend to do on December fourteenth.”

  “I heard about the elector in Michigan who got a death threat. But wasn’t that from a Stahl supporter?”

  “There are lunatics on both sides,” said Jack. “We’re only getting started.”

  Chapter 9

  The press conference was at 1:00 p.m. Jack was standing at his client’s side for the public announcement that Charlotte insisted on making, contrary to her lawyer’s advice. But it was up to her, not Jack.

  Media vans lined the street outside Hialeah Junior High School. Scores of reporters and camera crews encircled Charlotte and Jack, each jockeying for position and struggling to get a microph
one close enough to pick up her words. It was a typical mid-November day in South Florida, warm enough for short sleeves, the sun shining so brightly that any reporters caught without sunglasses were squinting and shading their eyes.

  “Good afternoon,” Charlotte began, reading her prepared remarks. “My name is Charlotte Holmes, and I am a duly elected member of Florida’s Electoral College.”

  The city of Hialeah was a crowded and in many places overcrowded immigrant community northwest of Miami. Its 90 percent Hispanic voting population had gone heavily for Senator Stahl in the general election, but that had nothing to do with Jack’s selection of the fifty-year-old junior high school as the venue for Charlotte’s announcement. Having lived in Miami all his life, Jack was one of the few Floridians who remembered that Hialeah Junior High School was nearly the site of Florida’s first mass school shooting. Jack was himself a middle-schooler when a man named Carl Brown walked into a Hialeah gun shop, purchased two shotguns and a semi-automatic rifle, rode his bicycle six blocks to a welding shop that he claimed had overcharged him the day before, and methodically shot and killed eight employees at close range, wounding three others. He climbed back on his bike and was pedaling to Hialeah Junior High School with the announced purpose of “killing a lot of people” when an employee of the welding shop caught up with him and gunned him down.

  It seemed like a fitting location for Charlotte’s press conference, in light of the explanation she’d given Jack for changing her vote from MacLeod to Stahl.

  “I was told that this public announcement of my intentions could be a dangerous move on my part,” said Charlotte, still reading. “Many will label me a faithless elector. A few might resort to undemocratic methods to intimidate me. But I feel it’s necessary to take that risk. My vote alone will not change the outcome of this election. Perhaps my words today will give other electors the courage to also vote their conscience.”

  Charlotte folded her script and tucked it away, her hand visibly shaking. “Thank you all very much.”

  It had lasted less than a minute. But the prepared remarks had been the easy part. A barrage of questions hit her from all directions, one of which seemed to cut through all the noise and demand a response.

  “Charlotte, why are you changing your vote?”

  Jack had been in agreement with Charlotte’s decision not to explain “why” in her prepared remarks. If asked, however, her answer would mark the end of her career as a gun lobbyist, even if she hadn’t already tendered her resignation to Madeline Chisel.

  Charlotte’s “evolution,” as she’d called it, had begun with the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Forty-nine people dead. A year later it was the Parkland High School massacre. Seventeen students and teachers dead. In the next legislative session, hundreds of Parkland students marched on the capital to change the state’s gun laws. Charlotte’s job as lobbyist was to kill the proposed ban on “bump stocks”—devices that even the MacLeod administration opposed, because they made semi-automatic rifles perform more like fully automatic machine guns. The kids somehow won that battle. Their courage—and the horrific videos of the massacre in progress on their smartphones—made an impression on Charlotte. She would never turn her back on law-abiding gun owners. Truth be told, had that courageous employee at the Hialeah welding shop not owned a gun, no one would have chased down Carl Brown, shot him dead, and stopped him from carrying out his plan to massacre the students of Hialeah Junior High. But she’d lost her passion to get up every morning and sell the gun lobby’s never-give-an-inch strategy. “Those Parkland kids changed me,” she’d told Jack in the privacy of his office. “So I’m changing my electoral vote.”

  It had made perfect sense to her lawyer—which was why no one was more surprised than Jack by Charlotte’s actual response to the media.

  “I came here today thinking I had the perfect answer to that question,” said Charlotte, reaching for her notes. Then she laid the paper aside. “But as I stand here now, I realize it’s more complicated than a sound bite about any particular issue. It’s about the media.”

  Jack tried not to look concerned in front of the cameras, but his pulse was pounding. His client was way off script.

  “I’m not a journalist, but I learned this much from a J-school professor in college: the word media comes from a Latin term meaning ‘intermediate’—which is a fancy-pants word for someone who comes between those who make news and the public that receives it. Intermediaries hold our leaders accountable for what they say. They help the public judge the truth of a politician’s statements. President MacLeod hates intermediaries. He trashes the press. He tweets whatever he wants directly to the people, and his lies go out to tens of millions of Americans every day unmediated. With all due respect to hardworking reporters here today, you are becoming irrelevant as intermediaries. The new media is social media—which means that, by and large, people hear what they want to hear.

  “So who will step up? Who will be the new intermediaries in the world without a functioning media?”

  It was an interesting question, but the irony was not lost on Jack that his client was talking unmediated by her lawyer.

  “When two-thirds of Americans believe their president is a habitual liar, and when he loses the nationwide popular election by more than five million votes, I believe it’s time for the Electoral College to do its job. So, to answer your question, I’m not casting my vote for Senator Stahl because I disagree with the president on assault weapons or abortion or any other single issue. I’m changing my vote because the truth matters. That’s my job. As intermediary.”

  “Thank you all for coming,” Jack told the crowd, “there will be no further questions at this time.”

  Members of the media—the maligned intermediaries—were having none of it. The circle tightened around Charlotte, the questions kept coming, and Jack realized the flaw in his staged event: no clear escape route. The result was an awkward standoff in which reporters kept firing questions, Charlotte said nothing, and Jack kept thanking them all for coming as he pushed his way through the crowd. It was a slow and steady exit, like spilled milk heading for the edge of the tabletop, but finally they made it to Jack’s car. Reporters continued to fire questions in machine-gun fashion even after Jack was behind the wheel and locked inside the vehicle with his client. Cameras captured the moment for the evening news as the car rolled out of the parking lot and pulled away.

  “Don’t ever blindside me like that again,” Jack said sharply.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It just came out.”

  “It should have come out in my office first.”

  “I didn’t lie to you. I did have a change of heart about the gun lobby.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But this is why the law doesn’t speak strictly in terms of ‘the truth.’ If I’m going to represent you, I need the whole truth.”

  She glanced out the window. “What will happen now?”

  Jack kept his eyes on the road. His father’s words at the “non-concession” speech on election night—“political Armageddon”—came to mind, but that wasn’t Jack’s concern.

  “We focus on keeping you safe,” said Jack.

  Chapter 10

  MacLeod’s victory tour reached New Orleans that afternoon.

  Charlotte Holmes’s press conference was televised live, and the president watched with his chief strategist on Ground Force One, seeing most of it on the road through Mississippi. They’d decided not to stop in the Magnolia State, the official reason being that it didn’t meet the new tour criteria of “battleground state.” In truth, MacLeod was worried about turnout for any victory rallies, as party leaders were still steaming over the president’s crack about “dumb southerners” on his last visit to the city of Jackson.

  “Who is that lawyer of hers?” asked MacLeod. “Is that Governor Swyteck’s son?”

  “It is,” said Teague.

  “What a low-IQ, low-energy loser. By what authority does he think a woman from Leon Co
unty, Florida, can call me a liar and override the majority of registered voters in Florida?”

  “It’s called the Hamiltonian school, sir. Alexander Hamilton was of the view that the Electoral College has a constitutional duty to protect the voters from being fooled into electing a demagogue.”

  “Hamiltonian school, huh? You know what I call it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The deep state.”

  Teague blinked, confused. “Charlotte Holmes is the deep state?”

  “No one benefits more from preserving the establishment than a paid lobbyist.”

  “Not everyone who is part of the establishment is part of the deep state.”

  “By definition, the deep state includes unelected, self-righteous, egotistical, elitist assholes who think it’s their job to override the will of the American people and protect them from their elected president. That’s exactly what Charlotte Holmes is doing by casting her electoral vote for Stahl.”

  Teague thought out loud for a moment. “The hijacking of the Electoral College as a political coup by the deep state. Interesting. That’s a message that actually could play in Peoria.”

  “That’s fine with me,” said MacLeod, “as long as we continue to hammer away at Senator Harvey Milk Jr.”

  “Hashtag ‘Deep State,’” said Teague. “That works for me.”

  “Lame,” said MacLeod. “We need to go even harder and attack Stahl as a sexual deviant. I’m thinking a rhyme: Deep State, hashtag ‘K-Y-Jellygate.’”

  “Please, no.”

  “It’s like Watergate, except—”

  “I get it, sir. But don’t tweet that. I’m begging you.”

  “We need to hit him hard, Oscar. And we need to hit back at Charlotte Holmes, too.”

  “Sir, our lawyers believe the White House should leave Ms. Holmes alone. It’s best to let any action against the electors be handled on the state level.”

  “There has to be a price to pay for this kind of disloyalty. Politically speaking, there must be consequences.”